How Stockroom Works

If you're looking strictly for nuts-and-bolts advice about Stockroom setup, you can safely skip this page. Here, we offer a brief theoretical introduction to inventory management and explain how Stockroom deals with key questions.

What Is Inventory?

Inventory, of course, is all your stuff. But in Stockroom (and in any warehouse-management system worth its salt), inventory has a more specific meaning:

In Stockroom, your inventory is the list of all (sku, quantity, location) records in your warehouse.

You only have inventory if you have all three elements:

1. Inventory must be something in particular — a sku with some sort of unique identifier.
2. Inventory must exist in a specific and countable quantity.
3. Inventory must be located somewhere — a location, again with a unique name.

The computer-science term for a thing like (sku, quantity, location) is a tuple, or an ordered set of values. Each time you scan an item into a new location, you create a new tuple in your Stockroom database: Ten REDSHIRT-LG in location RECEIVING. Two BLUEHAT in location A004BB. Two BLUEHAT in location SHOWCASE-01. Stockroom stores all these tuples, across your entire warehouse, and accesses them in milliseconds, combining and analyzing them to answer your specific inventory questions.

Even the most complex things in Stockroom are powered by these simple data shapes. From picking to auditing to replenishment, it all boils down to reading and writing lists of tuples. When you start thinking of warehouse problems this way, they are often easier to solve. And it's a great frame of reference for understanding Stockroom.

Data Flow

The core of Stockroom is your inventory. But on its own, inventory is just a static list — Stockroom's data model includes both the lists in its database and the methods it uses to work on those lists.

Integrations

Double-Entry Bookkeeping

Every inventory-related action in Stockroom is tracked by the Broker, an internal Stockroom service with exclusive access to the inventory table. All other processes and services send their inventory requests to the Broker, which enters them in a permanent double-entry ledger, like so:

Double-entry bookkeeping is the standard in financial accounting, but it has not been adopted by most inventory-control systems for warehouse operators. At Stockroom, we're serious about inventory accuracy, so we track every move your inventory makes, from receiving to shipping. No missing steps; no approximations; no fuzzy math that leaves manual work for you to do later. If you haven't tried all the WMS options out there, you might be surprised how uncommon this is.

Backups and Redundancy

Stockroom.cc uses multiple layers of backups to protect your business data. We host the Stockroom app on a cloud service in the eastern United States; our cloud provider makes regular backups which can roll back the database to a recent save point, if needed, within minutes.

However, we don't rely on our primary service provider, or their backup system, alone. We also run nightly backups of each Stockroom client's data and store them with a different cloud provider. These backups are a snapshot of all critical data, including your inventory table, your user data, your orders, etc., and in case of a true disaster at our primary service provider, these redundant backups offer an extra safety net.

In case of a long outage at our primary service provider (which has never happened in their history), we have the option to run Stockroom on a different cloud. We understand that your warehouse operating hours are precious --- we use Stockroom in our warehouse, too. So when there's a problem, rest assured we are all over it.

For information about our current server status --- and the status of our upstream service providers, including e-commerce platforms, cloud providers, our authentication provider, etc. --- you can always check status.stockroom.cc.