Ghost inventory in bins

There are a number of methods established for doing this.

I believe the NetSuite PS approach involves turning bins on and off. I’m not 100% sure if there are additional steps to take.

The most common offenders for this is doing an item receipt, vendor bill (if not associated to a PO), or inventory adjustment without a bin, performing a bin put away worksheet, and then going back and putting the bin on the receiving transaction.

My preferred method is to track down what happened so I can whack people on the wrist so they don’t do it again and fix it on the transactions (most commonly removing the duplicated item on the bin putaway worksheet)

My viewpoint is – you either do bin put away worksheets or you don’t. If you do bin putaway worksheets, don’t edit item receipts. If you don’t do them, then edit them.

This could also happen if someone reduces inventory before another transaction occurs move inventory away. Generally this is solved by forcing people to not backdate things. I don’t care *when* it actually happened, I just care that my current inventory doesn’t match. Fix it now, not in the past. Changing stuff in the past often has very unintended consequences.

Another common issue is if items were put into one bin, and then someone edits a transaction that pre-dates it to change quantities.

The method I most commonly use for finding this is to search for bin on hand or inventory detail (depending on if you are using lot numbers) where the quantity is *not* equal to zero as opposed to greater than zero. This would accommodate for “oh i pushed inventory around.

Regards

Thanks! I really have no idea how this is happening, and the warehouse manager can’t explain it to me either. So my goal right now is to clean it up and moving forward I hope to catch it when it happens so I can correct whatever behavior is causing this. I ended up using the NS suggested approach, which is to turn off ‘use bins’ on the item record, do an inventory adjustment that gets rid of the mismatch (sets location on hand to equal bin on hand), then edit item record again to turn on ‘use bins’, and do a second inventory adjustment to set quantity to the correct amount.

We have experienced something like this issue when someone removes a bin from an inventory item record. Example: Bin A has 2 and Bin B has -2 so None on Hand.  Then someone removed Bin B.  Still had None on Hand but on Bin tab only Bin A showed with 2 in it.  We find which Bin was removed by looking at Transaction History.  Re-add the Bin and it will say -2.