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Warehouses

Warehouses represent the places inventory can live. They may be physical warehouses, rooms, trucks, or other operational locations, but the important point is that availability and movement are calculated from these locations.

Warehouse coordination controls how formal Pluck should be about movement between those locations. New companies start in Simple storage mode, which is best when the team mainly needs to know where gear is now and can receive returns into whichever warehouse is physically handling them. Existing companies keep Operational transfer mode so any transfer process already in use stays intact until an owner changes the setting.

Set up warehouses in the same way your team talks about inventory. An Operational warehouse is a staffed location that owns pick, receive, transfer, and daily work. A Storage-only location is a physical place inventory can live without becoming its own staffed operation.

Storage-only locations may optionally be managed by an Operational warehouse. When a storage annex has a managed-by warehouse, that parent warehouse can pull from it directly, and other operational warehouses should request stock from the parent instead of treating the annex as an unrelated staffed warehouse. If a storage-only location has no parent, authorized operational users can use it as a direct storage location while Pluck still records inventory movement history.

Warehouse records can also carry facility details such as square footage and monthly facility costs. The warehouse list and edit modal show the cost of goods stored in that location based on inventory type cost, serialized items, and bulk stock quantities. From the warehouse row menu, open the inventory cost report when you need a printable list of the items, quantities, warehouse, unit cost, and total cost behind that number.

In practice, warehouses define storage locations for serialized and bulk stock. Users can have a home warehouse used as a default in many workflows. Costs, operation mode, managed-by warehouse, and facility metadata support reporting and planning.

Transfers

Transfers describe inventory moving between warehouses. A transfer should make it clear what was requested, who approved it, when it left, and when it was received so availability does not depend on memory.

Use a permanent transfer when ownership or normal storage is moving from one warehouse to another. Receiving the transfer updates serialized item warehouse assignment or moves bulk stock from the source to the destination, and item history records the movement.

Use a temporary/order-fulfillment transfer when another warehouse needs inventory for a customer order but the source warehouse should get it back afterward. Temporary transfers should be planned during reservation or prep, with the needed-by date and expected return called out before the pick team discovers the shortage.

In practice, transfers progress requested -> approved -> in transit -> received (or cancelled). Temporary transfers can continue into returned and closed states as the order is fulfilled and the source warehouse gets its gear back. Transfer status changes should be auditable and timestamped.

Cross rentals

Cross rentals are for demand that cannot be met from owned inventory. Keeping vendor and fulfillment status visible during picking helps the team see which items are coming from outside the company.

Use cross-rental requests and orders to make outside fulfillment visible instead of hiding it in notes. A request captures the order, customer/date context, needed type or category, quantity, notes, and preferred vendor. Vendor quotes and confirmed orders can track substitutions, quoted cost, delivery or freight information, vendor references, and the customer-facing pricing decision.

At receive time, record what the vendor actually sent. Vendor-provided assets, cases, accessories, serials, or asset IDs are return obligations for this order, not local Pluck inventory. Return-to-vendor work should stay visible until those obligations are returned or closed.

Cross-rental cost is separate from customer price. A manager may pass the cost through, apply a markup, absorb the cost, or set a manual customer price depending on permissions and the order agreement. Customer delivery and pickup fees remain customer-facing order lines, while vendor delivery, pickup, and freight stay vendor costs.