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 with a due date and a signature.
- 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 submitted purchase orders with your vendors' own part numbers on them. Add Appointments and customers book service windows themselves.
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, when, and what condition it came back in.
That history is what settles the argument about whether a tool was broken when it went out. It 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 the job actually consumed
Parts pulled for a job get recorded against that job rather than vanishing into a general adjustment. At the end of the week you can see what a job consumed, not just what you invoiced for it.
That is usually where the margin surprise lives. The labor estimate was close and the parts were not, and nobody knew because the parts came off a truck nobody was counting.
Serial and lot data travels with the part, so a warranty claim eighteen months later resolves to the specific unit you installed and the job you installed it on.
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. If you run Purchasing, that queue becomes purchase orders against the vendors you actually buy from, carrying their part numbers rather than yours, so receiving matches without translation.
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 Inventory and Purchasing pays $268 a month
That is the whole bill: $89 + $59 in modules, plus ten Growth seats at $12. See pricing for other mixes.