How is availability calculated?

An overview of all of the ways that your availability is impacted.

Matthew James Finkel avatar
Written by Matthew James Finkel
Updated over a week ago

Every time you take an action in the system that impacts your stock, Current RMS automatically calculates availability so you always know what stock you have available now and in future.

In this guide, we’ll run through all of the actions that impact your availability and how. 

Your system availability period 

At the very base of all availability calculation is your system availability period, set in System Preferences

There are four options to choose from: day, half day, quarter day, and hour.

Products are unavailable from the start of the availability period they fall in, and available from the next availability period. For example, if your availability period is set to day, an item booked out at any time today and checked-in at any time tomorrow is considered unavailable for all of today and tomorrow.

We’ve got a guide that runs through how your availability period works in more detail, check out: Change your availability period

Stores

If you have multiple locations where you hold stock, set up additional stores to record how much stock you have available in each store.

You can set the store that you’re working from the store menu at the top-right.

Your availability screens show stock in your current store, but on some screens you can choose the store or add multiple stores.

Similarly, you can select which store an opportunity belongs to when you create it. 

To learn more, see: Stores

Adding products to an opportunity

The most common way that your availability is impacted is by adding products to opportunities. As you move through the opportunity process, your product availability is adjusted as your order becomes more likely to proceed. 

In general, products are unavailable from the start & end date or delivery & pickup date of an opportunity.

Allocating assets

If you like, you can allocate serialized assets to an opportunity to specify which particular stock level is being rented or sold on an opportunity. You can allocate stock levels to provisional and reserved quotations, as well as orders.

When you allocate a serialized asset, availability for that particular asset is updated. You can view availability for your serialized assets by using the product bookings screen.

Checking-in stock

When finalizing check-in for your stock on an order, you can specify a “return at” date. This is the date that you wish the items to be considered available from again. 

Product post rent unavailability

After check-in, you might like some products to be unavailable for an additional amount of time so you can turn them around for the next rental, e.g. cleaning or maintenance. 

Set post rent unavailability against a product in Current RMS to do this. It lets you set an amount of time after your products come back from an opportunity that they’re unavailable for. It’s shown in your availability screens in dark blue.

You can add post rent unavailability when creating products, see: Create products

Quarantining products or stock levels

If products or stock levels are lost, damaged, or in for service, move them to them to the quarantine to take them out of availability. You can set a start and end date on a quarantine job, or set quarantines as open ended to specify that the items should be unavailable indefinitely.

You can return quarantines to availability by booking out the quarantine.

To learn more about the quarantine, see: What is the quarantine?

Stock transactions and store transfer

Stock transactions and store transfer are a way of recording the movement of stock levels in & out of your business and between your stores.

For example, if you’ve lost some stock, you can add a stock transaction to record this. Stock transactions increase or decrease your available stock.

See: 

Common questions

Why do I see 0 available when picking products?

Sounds like the effective date on your stock level is before the start date of the opportunity. We’ve got a great troubleshooter, see: Why does my product show as having zero (or negative) stock available?

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