A plumbing or electrical outfit does not lose inventory in the warehouse. It loses it in van three, on a Thursday, two jobs from the shop. Knowledge ERP treats every van as a location, so truck stock is tracked stock.
Truck stock is the part nobody counts
Most trades businesses have a decent handle on the warehouse and none at all on the vans. The warehouse gets counted. The vans get restocked by whoever notices they are empty, usually the tech, usually on the way to a job, usually without telling anyone.
The result is familiar. You buy a fitting you already own six of, because the six are spread across four trucks. A tech drives back to the shop for something that was sitting in the van behind him. At the end of the year the count is off and nobody can say by how much, because the vans were never in the count to begin with.
None of that is a discipline problem. It is that the vans were never modeled as places that hold stock. We walked through what this looks like for a plumbing outfit specifically, if you want the longer version.
The setup that works
Make the warehouse and each van a location. Fittings, valves and wire live as products with units in bins; the expensive test equipment gets serial numbers. Restocking a van is a transfer, with in-transit visibility while the parts move. When a tech grabs a meter for the week, that is an asset checkout to that tech, with a due date.
- Per-van stock counts, so "do we have one on a truck?" has an answer
- Barcode labels on every unit and bin, printed from label sheets
- Reorder points per location, with a reorder digest on the mornings you pick
- Cycle counts by van, ten minutes in the parking lot instead of a lost Saturday
Add Purchasing and the low stock report turns into draft purchase orders with your vendors' own part numbers on them.
Tools are not parts
Consumables get used up. Tools come back, or they are supposed to. Treating them the same way is why the good pipe threader has been missing since spring and three people each think someone else has it.
Tools get tracked as individual units with serial numbers and asset tags, and they get checked out to a named person with a due date rather than deducted from a count. Every tool has a history: who has had it and when, with any notes made when it came back.
That history is also what tells you that the same crew returns things late every time, which is a conversation worth having before you buy a replacement.
What went out on the order
If you run Sales as well, the parts that go out on a customer's order are recorded against that order, unit by unit, so you can look back at what the order took.
Restocking without losing a Saturday
Reorder points are set per location, which matters because a van and a warehouse do not need the same minimums. The van needs two of the fitting you use constantly; the warehouse needs forty.
Low stock surfaces as a queue rather than as a discovery. With Purchasing, that queue becomes draft purchase orders against the vendors you actually buy from, carrying their part numbers rather than yours.
Counting works the same way. A cycle count on one van takes about ten minutes in the parking lot before the first job. Counting one van a day means every truck is counted every week or two, which is far better coverage than an annual count and costs nobody a weekend.
Where to start
Pick your busiest van and set it up as a location this week. Do not do the whole fleet, and do not start with the warehouse.
One van tells you quickly whether the process survives contact with an actual working day, and it is small enough that if the answer is no you have lost an afternoon rather than a month. If your parts list currently lives on a spreadsheet, import it as CSV and start from that.
A 10-person crew with a warehouse and two vans pays $209 a month
That is the whole bill: $89 for Inventory, plus ten Growth seats at $12. Growth covers three locations. With more vans, Business covers ten, at $15 a seat ($239 for the same crew). See pricing for other mixes.