Vending & Point-of-Use

A vending location is any physical thing on your floor that holds inventory in numbered bins — a vending machine, a locker bank, a carousel, or a plain non-electric shelf unit. They are all managed from the Build Planner page (sidebar: Inventory → Locations → Build Planner), grouped by location group.

Two shapes of location

• Standard locations (Locker, Carousel, Coil) are a simple grid: x columns across, y rows down. Each cell of the grid is one bin. The map icon opens its bin map.
• Cabinets (Auto-Lista or Non-Electric) hold drawers, and each drawer has its own grid of bins. The server icon opens the cabinet view — see Working with cabinet drawers.

When adding, you pick a Machine Type: Auto-Lista, Carousel, Coil Machine, Locker 1.0, Locker 2.0, Non-Electric, Coil V3, or Locker V3. Some types are pre-shaped — Coil V3 locks the grid at 10 × 6, and Locker V3 asks for a Locker Number that sets the sequence ID prefix (Locker 1 = 101, 102…).

Useful switches

• Auto-assign products to this location — placing a product in a bin automatically adds this location to that product’s location assignments.
• Finished Goods location — marks the location so converted finished goods can load here.
• Active — inactive locations stay defined but are not in use.

The Location, Cabinet, and Import buttons (and the edit/delete icons) only appear if your user group has the matching permissions. To build or refill a whole location from a spreadsheet, use the The vending import wizard wizard.

Open a cabinet from the Build Planner (the server icon) and you get a two-panel view: the cabinet’s drawers on the left, and the selected drawer’s bin grid on the right. Each drawer button shows its bin count and a small stock dot — green when everything is stocked, yellow when some bins are empty, red when something is below its minimum.

Adding a drawer

Click Add Drawer (shown only with the add permission) and fill in:

• Drawer Label — the friendly name shown on the cabinet visual, like A1 or Top Drawer.
• System Name — a unique identifier, like CABINET1-DRAWER-A1. The import wizard matches rows to drawers by this name.
• Columns (X) and Rows (Y) — the bin grid. Grid size cannot be changed after creation, so count carefully.
• Hardware Sequence ID — optional. All bins in the drawer share this number as the hardware output signal; leave it blank to auto-assign sequential IDs.

Fixing a drawer later

Edit Drawer lets you rename it, toggle Active, set every bin to one sequence ID with Update All, and — if fewer bins exist than the grid expects — a Create Missing Bins button appears to fill in the gaps.

Deleting a drawer removes all of its bins and their product assignments, so the app warns you first. Clicking any bin tile opens the quick edit panel — see Bin settings: min, max, and issue quantity.

Every bin carries a handful of numbers that tell the system how to manage it. Open a bin by clicking its tile on the bin map or in the cabinet view — a quick edit panel slides out, with a Full editor link for the complete page.

• Min — the reorder alert threshold. When the quantity drops below this, the bin shows red and the item turns up in shortage reporting.
• Max — the bin’s capacity. Refill targets and the “how full is this bin” math both use it.
• Issue Quantity — how many units are dispensed per transaction. A box of 10 gloves issued as a box should have an issue quantity of 10.
• Lock Issue Qty — when locked, users cannot change the quantity at issue time.
• Active — whether the bin is available for transactions at all.
• Consignment — marks the product as supplier-owned consignment stock, which is flagged on every transaction.

Two fields are read-only on purpose: On hand is updated by transactions (issues, stocking, counts) rather than typed in, and Sequence ID is the hardware output signal wired to the machine.

Reading the colors

Bin tiles are color-coded: gray means empty — no product assigned, red means below minimum — reorder, yellow means getting low, and green means well stocked.

The Empty button clears the product from a bin. Sensible min/max values also feed purchasing — see Auto-generating POs from the production schedule.

Every time a bin’s quantity changes, the system writes a row in the Transactions log. This is your answer to “who took the last one, and when?” — each row records the product, cabinet, bin, device it happened on, the user, the date, and whether the item was consignment stock.

Transaction types

• Issue — product was taken out of a bin.
• Stock — product was added during a refill.
• Count — the quantity was corrected during a physical count.
• New Tag, Door Opened, Removed from Cab, and NoProd — events reported by the connected hardware, useful when reconciling what the machine did.

Reading a row

The Before, Qty, and After columns show the bin quantity before the transaction, the change itself, and the result — so you can spot exactly where a count went sideways. Unit Cost and Total put a dollar value on each movement, which is what usage and spend reporting are built on.

Finding things

Type anything into the search box — a product code, a user, a device name — and the list filters as you type. The From/To date pickers plus Apply Filter narrow by date, and the Today, This Week, and This Month presets save you the clicks.

The vending app that workers actually touch runs on a device — a kiosk, tablet, or terminal next to the machines. Two small setup pages tell the system which device controls which cabinet:

1. Active Locations — register the device

Active Locations (sidebar: Inventory → Locations) is the list of devices. Each has a Device Name, a Description, and an Active flag. Make the description clear — other areas of the app use it for filtering. The name is locked after creation, so name it after where it lives, not what it is today.

2. UI/Cabinet Connections — pair device to cabinet

UI/Cabinet Connections maps kiosk/UI devices to cabinets. Click Connection, give it a Description (also locked after creation), then pick from Available UI and Available Cabinets and set it Active. One device can be connected to several cabinets — a single kiosk often serves a whole bank of machines.

Why bother? Beyond making the hardware work, every row in the The vending transaction log log records the Device it happened on, so a clean device list means a readable audit trail.

On both pages the add, edit, and delete controls only appear if your user group has the matching permission — grayed-out buttons mean you don’t. The The vending import wizard wizard can also create a device and its connection as part of building a new location.