Know what's on every truck without counting every night.

Truck stock is where profit leaks quietly. A part used and never billed, a truck that carries six of something it never uses, a special order that sits at the counter for three days. TradesWork inventory is built around one idea: the invoice is the source of truth for usage. When a tech bills a tracked material, it comes off their truck. Everything else (templates, counts, replenishment, purchase orders) keeps that number honest.

How stock moves

Every change to stock is a transaction with a type, and the history is append-only: nothing edits or deletes a past movement, corrections are new transactions.

Because every change is recorded and safe to replay, a tech's phone retrying a sync can't double-count a part.

app.tradeswork.app · Inventory with warehouse and truck stock

Truck stock in the field

On the phone, My truck lists what's on the truck with the template beside it ("3 on your truck · carry 6"). Low items are marked. From there a tech can:

• Scan a part's barcode or the shelf label to find it.
• Count the truck. The count is saved on the phone, sent when there's signal, and waits for the office to review. Until then the app shows "1 count waiting for the office to review."
• Request restock. Add items, send to the warehouse. The request moves from Requested to Picked ("ready for you") to Completed when the tech taps "It's on my truck".
• Mark parts used from the truck under the invoice.

Technicians only ever see their own truck. Another truck simply doesn't exist for them.

Min/max and replenishment

Templates set a minimum and maximum per item for each location. Replenishment runs one simple rule: any location below its minimum is refilled to its maximum, net of what's already coming (open transfers and open PO lines).

1. 1

   Trucks pull from their warehouse

   Each truck refills from its source warehouse while the warehouse has stock. The warehouse is never taken below zero, and stock already promised to another truck isn't shared twice.

2. 2

   The rest is bought

   Whatever the warehouse can't cover, plus the warehouse's own shortfalls against its template, goes on a purchase from the item's preferred vendor.

3. 3

   Grouped by vendor

   Purchases are grouped into one draft PO per vendor, shipped to the warehouse, or straight to the truck if it has no warehouse.

4. 4

   You approve

   Approving creates the transfer requests for the warehouse to pull and the draft POs. Items with no preferred vendor are listed separately so you can pick one.

Purchase orders

There are two kinds. Stock POs refill a location. Special-order POs buy parts for one job and link to it, so you can see which jobs are waiting on parts.

A PO goes Draft, Submitted, then Partially received or Received, then Closed (or Canceled). Receiving can be partial, line by line, into the ship-to location. Each receipt records the actual unit cost and moves the item's average cost:

If on-hand was negative, it counts as zero in that formula, since those units were already used at an unknown cost. Serialized items (condensers, water heaters) need one serial per unit at receiving, and a serial already in the system is refused.

How the vendor gets the PO. TradesWork doesn't email it and never claims it did. You share the PO's printable link or print it, and mark it sent. Vendor accounts can record a preferred ordering method (cXML punchout, EDI through a provider, or a distributor API), but those need the distributor's onboarding and show "Not connected" until they're live.

Returns and review

Vendor returns cover wrong, damaged and extra parts. A return opens as pending, with an optional vendor RMA number and PO. Nothing leaves stock until you mark it returned, and the credit is expected at average cost unless the vendor says otherwise. Record the credit memo number and amount when it arrives.

Inventory review is the cleanup queue:

• Negative on hand: more was used than the system thought was there. Count the location, or mark it reviewed if stock is on its way.
• Invoiced but not deducted: tracked materials on an invoice that haven't come out of stock yet.
• Counts to review: truck counts from the field waiting for approval.

Where the cost goes

Inventory is also what makes job costing honest. Materials used on a job are costed at what the inventory ledger carried for them: the moving average cost, or the receipt cost. A capacitor bought at three different prices over the summer is costed at the blend, not at whatever number someone typed into the price book two years ago. When a job's margin looks wrong, the usage lines show exactly which parts came off which truck and at what cost.

How it compares

ServiceTitan's inventory page describes organizing items in trucks and warehouses, templates per truck or warehouse, replenishment triggered by stock levels, a barcode Inventory App, and tracking purchases, vendor returns, transfers and adjustments in one place.¹ The everyday workflow is similar. The differences are in the edges: TradesWork puts the scanner inside the same technician app instead of a separate one, and lets stock go negative with a review queue so a tech is never stopped on a job. Where TradesWork falls short today is electronic ordering: no e-POs to distributors and no live distributor pricing.

Rolling it out

1. Mark tracked items in the price book first. Untracked items never touch stock, which is right for consumables like tape and rags.
2. Add the warehouse and a truck for each tech, and do one opening count per truck.
3. Template ten high-turn parts per truck.
4. Run replenishment weekly for a month and compare the transfer list with what the warehouse actually pulled.
5. Watch the negative and not-deducted lists. If they grow, the issue is usually price book items that aren't marked tracked, or a truck that isn't assigned to its tech.