Shelf locations

A shelf location records where a product physically sits in your shop — aisle A3, rack R-12, the fridge, the locked cabinet out back. Once it's recorded, anyone can find the item in seconds: it shows on the cashier screen, on your stock lists, on transfers and purchase deliveries, on printed labels, and on the count sheet you carry round the shop.

Overview

"Where do we keep the ibuprofen?" is one of the most common questions in any shop, and until now the answer lived in someone's head. A shelf location writes it down. You describe the spot using up to four coordinates — aisle, rack, shelf and bin — and POS shows that wherever the product appears.

Two things make it work in the real world:

• Locations are recorded per store. Branch A can keep a product on rack 12 while Branch B keeps it on rack 3, and each branch's staff see their own answer.
• A product can be kept in more than one place. A pharmacy might keep one SKU on the dispensing rack, another few boxes in the godown, some in the fridge, and the controlled stock in a locked cabinet. You can record all four.

One of those places is marked as the main spot — the shelf people pick from. That's the one that shows in the products list, on labels, and as the badge on the cashier screen; the rest are one tap away.

Why it's useful

• New staff find things on day one. No more walking the aisles or asking the person who's been there longest.
• Deliveries get put away in the right place. Receiving a purchase shows each line's location, so the person unpacking knows where it belongs.
• Counts happen in walk order. The printable count sheet is grouped by location, so you count the shop the way you actually walk it — no criss-crossing.
• Expiry sweeps get quicker. The batches list shows where each batch lives, so pulling short-dated stock is one lap, not several.
• Customers get an answer at the counter. The cashier can see the location on the product tile without leaving the cart.

Recording a location, step by step

1. Open the product

   Go to Products, open the item, and scroll to the Shelf locations section.

2. Add a location

   Click Add a location and fill in the coordinates you use — for example Aisle A3, Rack R-12. You only fill the fields your shop actually uses; the rest can be switched off entirely (see Naming the fields).

3. Say what kind of place it is

   Pick a type of place — main shelf, back stock, refrigerated, locked cabinet, or other. This is how staff know whether they're being sent to the shop floor or the store room.

4. Mark the main spot

   Tick Main spot on the shelf people pick from. Each store has exactly one — ticking a new one moves the mark off the old one.

5. Add a note if it helps

   The optional Note field is for the bit that doesn't fit a coordinate — "behind the counter", "top shelf, needs the step stool".

6. Save

   Save the product. The location appears immediately across the app — including on tills, which pick it up on their next sync.

The types of place

Naming the fields to match your shop

Every shop describes its space differently. A supermarket says "aisle"; a pharmacy says "rack"; a warehouse says "bin". Go to Settings → Stock locations and you can:

• Turn fields on or off. Out of the box, Aisle and Rack are on and Shelf and Bin are off — so a small shop only ever sees two boxes to fill.
• Rename them. Call "Aisle" a Section, or "Bin" a Tray, and that name is used everywhere in the app.

Turning a field off only hides it. Anything already recorded is kept and comes straight back if you switch it on again. You must keep at least one field on, otherwise there'd be nothing to fill in.

Setting locations in bulk

Typing a location into a few thousand products one at a time is nobody's idea of a good afternoon. From the Products list you can do a whole aisle at once:

1. Filter to the products you're placing

   Filter by category, brand, supplier — whatever describes the shelf you're standing at. There's also a Location filter with Has a location and No location yet, which is how you find what's still missing.

2. Select the rows

   Tick individual products, or tick the header box to take the whole page. If your filter matches more than one page, POS offers Select all … matching so you can apply to every matching product, not just the ones on screen.

3. Choose Set location

   Fill in only the fields you want to change. Anything you leave blank keeps its current value — so you can stamp a new rack across 200 products without touching their aisles.

4. Apply

   POS confirms how many products it updated. Very large runs are done in batches — if there's more to do it tells you, so you can narrow the filter and finish the rest.

Clear location works the same way and removes the main shelf location for the selected products at the current store. Back stock, refrigerated and locked-cabinet locations are deliberately left alone.

Importing locations from a spreadsheet

If you already keep a shelf map in Excel, import it. The product importer accepts location columns alongside everything else — map them in the wizard's column-matching step, and bare headers like Aisle, Rack or Bin are matched automatically.

Blank cells are left alone, never blanked out — so re-importing a price list will not wipe the locations you've already entered. The same location columns come back out in a product export, which makes "export → fill in the gaps → re-import" a perfectly good way to map a whole shop.

Where locations show up

Every one of these screens shows the location for its own store — the transfer's source store, the stock take's store, the purchase order's store — never whichever store you happen to have selected in the top bar.

The printable count sheet

Open a stock take and choose Print count sheet. You get a clean, print-first page with the lines grouped by shelf location in walk order, so you count the shop in one pass instead of hunting up and down for the next product on the list. Items with no location yet are grouped together at the end under No location set — a handy to-do list.

There's a Hide expected (blind count) option on the sheet. A blind count hides what the system thinks you have, so whoever's counting writes down what they genuinely see rather than what they're expected to see. It's the honest way to run a count, and worth using for any count that matters.

Tips & best practices

Notes & warnings

Related: Products · Stock overview · Stock reconciliation · Barcode labels · Settings