Stock totals & negative stock

Every stock figure you see in the system — the availability lines on purchase orders and stock transfers, the stock figures on order and invoice lines, a product's current-stock total, price lists and the label maker — follows one rule, controlled by a single setting:

Setup → Accounts → your main admin → Inventory tab → "Ignore negative stock in totals" (default: ON)

Why negative stock exists

A shelf row can go negative when the system records stock leaving that shelf without a matching arrival — for example goods were sold or transferred from a shelf before the purchase they belong to was received, or a correction went the wrong way. A negative shelf is a signal that something should be corrected on that shelf; it is not "available" stock.

What the setting does

ON (default) — negative shelves are ignored:

• A location total (the sum across all shelves of one location) counts only shelves with a positive quantity. A shelf holding −1 000 does not drag the location total down, so a location with +100 on one shelf and −1 000 on another shows 100, not −900.
• A shelf-level figure shown next to a line's location never displays below zero — a negative shelf shows as 0.

OFF — raw sums:

• Location totals are plain sums of all shelves (positive and negative), and shelf figures can display negative values. Use this if you want anomalies to stay visible in the day-to-day editing screens.

Where it applies

Where it deliberately does NOT apply

• Stock reports keep the real (raw) values — reports are accounting views and must show negative quantities as they are.
• Reorder suggestions (creating draft purchase orders from reorder points) are business calculations, not displays.

Example

A product has two shelves in warehouse v: shelf A holds +100, shelf B holds −40.

On a purchase order whose destination is v, the line's availability figure and the ⓘ popup use the same number — and so does the Activity Log snapshot if you edit that line.