Guide / the flow, drawn
An inventory flowchart you can actually use
The whole discipline in one loop: goods in, goods promised, goods out, goods counted — with the decision points where businesses leak. Walk it once and you can audit any system.
The flow, in one view
- Purchase: demand signal → reorder check → purchase order raised → supplier.
- Receive: goods arrive → counted against the order → variance? → resolve or accept.
- Store & move: put away → location known → transfers leave trails.
- Sell: order placed → allocation check → promised or refused.
- Fulfil: pick → pack → ship → partial? → invoice what shipped.
- Bill: invoice approved → pushed to accounting → payment status mirrors back.
- Verify: count → variance → explained from history → adjusted.
- 01The flow, in one view
- 02The decision points where flows leak
- 03Where BSimple fits
The decision points where flows leak
At receive: was every line counted against the order, or did the docket go in a drawer? The variance decision — resolve now or accept knowingly — is the first branch, and skipping it is where discrepancies are born. At allocation: does the promise check live quantities, or is it an optimistic note? This is the branch where overselling is decided, in an instant. At ship: partial shipments split the document — invoice what shipped, keep the remainder visible — and flows that cannot split produce invoices that lie. At count: is a variance explained from the movement history before adjustment, or does the count silently overwrite? The second version discards the only evidence the system had.
Walk any candidate system through those four branches and you have audited it — the order processing flow covers the selling half in detail, and the procurement loop the buying half.
Where BSimple fits
We build BSimple, so weigh that. Its record implements the loop end to end: purchase orders from reorder signals, goods receipts updating live quantities, allocation-backed orders, pick and pack with partial-shipment handling, invoices approved and pushed to Xero or MYOB with payment status mirrored back, and phone-based counts with variance review. One record under every state, so the branches are decisions rather than arguments. Plans start at $180/month (AUD), and the free trial runs your own goods through every branch once.
The boundary: BSimple draws the flow, it does not redraw it per business — workflows are the standard loop of a product business, configured by levels and thresholds rather than by diagram editors. The system definition explains that design choice, and the inventory management overview shows the record the loop runs on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the main stages of an inventory flow?
Seven, in order: purchase, receive, store and move, sell (allocate), fulfil (pick and ship), bill, verify (count). Every inventory system is an implementation of that loop; the differences are whether the states are real documents on one record or hand-offs between copies.
Where should the flowchart show decision points?
At the four branches: accept-or-resolve at receipt, promise-or-refuse at allocation, split-or-wait at shipment, explain-then-adjust at count. A flowchart without those branches describes the happy path, which is the only path it never actually follows.
How does BSimple map to this flowchart?
Each stage is a document on one record: purchase order, goods receipt, order, pick, pack, invoice, count — with the branches built in (variance review, allocation refusals, partial shipments). The diagram above is essentially the product's spine, which is why the trial maps so directly.
Can we customise the flow?
Within limits: reorder levels, thresholds, approval steps and locations are configured; the stage order is standard. Businesses needing a genuinely different flow — approval chains across departments, bespoke routing — are shopping in the BPM category, and honesty requires saying so.
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