Negative stock may occur for the following reasons:
If you forgot to record entries on that stock, or you recorded an entry with a quantity different from the one on the supplier's invoice (for example, you entered fewer litres or kilograms than you actually received), and the stock is in the recipe of a product that is on sale. Check the entries for that item in History and compare the quantities with the invoices you received.
To find the period where entries are missing, look at the item's History one period at a time, for example month by month, and compare how much came in through Entries with how much was deducted by sales and consumption. If the two are usually close, but in one month much less came in than was consumed, that is where the negative stock comes from. Look for supplier invoices from that month that were not added to Entries, or were added with a smaller quantity.
If you have several locations, also check which location the entry was recorded on. Stock is kept separately for each location, and an entry only increases the stock of the location where it was recorded. An invoice recorded on another location by mistake does not cover the negative stock at the location where the goods are sold.
Also watch out for ingredients deducted twice. If an ingredient is in the product's recipe and, at the same time, in the recipe of an option (modifier) that you choose when selling that product, the ingredient is deducted twice on every receipt with that option. Example: a drink has milk in its recipe and also has a milk option with its own recipe. When the option is selected, the milk is deducted once from the drink's recipe and once more from the option's recipe.
How do we fix the situation?
We add the invoice / invoices from the supplier with the current negative stock to the Entries.
If the invoice was recorded on a different location than the one where the goods are used, record it on the correct location.
We reset the stock to the correct quantity through an Inventory. Attention: saving the inventory only records the count (the book quantity, the physical quantity, and the difference between them) — it does not correct the stock automatically. For the stock to be aligned with the counted quantity, you need to open the saved inventory, select the goods, and click “Reset Stock”.
We reset the stock to the correct quantity manually, directly on the stock item, without creating an inventory document.
When you search in Products for the name of the negative stock, also look at the options (modifiers) in the list, not only at the main products. If the ingredient appears both in the product's recipe and in the recipe of an option on that product, keep it in only one of the two places, or adjust the quantities so that together they match the actual consumption.
2. If in the recipe of the product we have for sale we have added the wrong quantity, higher than the actual quantity used.
How do we fix the situation?
We go to the Configuration section and search by the name of the negative stock, to see what recipes it is in, exactly as in the picture:
This will display the products that contain this stock and we can see the quantities used in each recipe, to change them if they are wrong:
For more details on how to modify a recipe, click here.
Attention: Stock is reduced automatically after a sale, but not instantly — the movement is recorded by an automated process a few minutes after the receipt is issued and receives the date and time of the sale. All stock movements can be tracked in History, which can be accessed quickly from the Stocks list.
If you made a consumption receipt for more than the available stock
A consumption receipt created in Admin (Stock Management - Stocks or Products - Products) can be saved even when the stock does not cover the consumed quantity. In that case the message "After saving, the stock will be negative for: ... Continue?" appears before saving. If you chose Continue, the stock went negative by exactly that difference. You can find it in History as a consumption receipt movement.
How do we fix the situation?
If the goods actually arrived at the location but the invoice has not been added yet, add the supplier invoice under Entries. Otherwise, align the stock with the real quantity through an inventory or a stock reset, as described above. If the consumption receipt was saved with a wrong quantity, edit it from History.
If the negative stock is a semi-finished product with a sub-recipe, and you added the sub-recipe after you had already been selling it
A semi-finished product - dough, sauce, cream, cake base, or similar - is not purchased from a supplier, so there is no goods receipt to create for it, and the causes described above do not apply. In this case, the negative stock comes from the period when you were selling it before the sub-recipe existed.
Before it had a sub-recipe, each sale directly reduced the stock of the semi-finished product, and nothing was added back to it, so the balance decreased with every receipt. From the moment the sub-recipe was added, each sale reduces the ingredients in the sub-recipe (for example, flour and water), while the semi-finished product itself no longer receives any stock movements. This means that the accumulated negative balance remains at the value it reached and does not increase anymore - today's sales no longer make it more negative.
How to verify that this is your situation: open Inventory - History for the semi-finished product and for the ingredients in its sub-recipe, and compare the latest Sale movement for each. If the latest Sale for the semi-finished product is much older than the latest Sale for the ingredients, and from a certain date onwards movements appear only for the ingredients, then the negative balance is historical: that is the point when the sub-recipe started being used.
How do we fix the situation?
One time, one action: Inventory - Stock - search for the semi-finished product - Reset stock, with the quantity set to 0. The balance returns to 0 and stays there because nothing will affect it from now on. See the article “How do I reset stock?”.
If an ingredient that you do not keep track of also appears as negative - most commonly tap water - it can be fixed in the same way, by resetting it to 0. If you do not want to track it at all, you can also remove it from the semi-finished product's sub-recipe, but this is a separate decision and is not part of the correction.
What NOT to do in this situation?
Do not remove the semi-finished product (or water) from the product recipe. This breaks the connection with the sub-recipe, so the ingredients will no longer be deducted from that point onward - you would break the configuration that is already working correctly.
Do not activate production just to “cover” the negative balance. Activating production does not simply add to what you already had; it changes the behavior: sales will start reducing the semi-finished product again, so it will become negative again with every receipt unless you record a production document every day.
Do not record a production document just to bring the semi-finished product back into positive stock. This would consume the ingredients a second time even though they have already been consumed, which would make their stock incorrect.
[tags: negative stock, recipe, history, inventory, minus, how to check recipe, stock moves, consumption receipt, negative stock after consumption receipt, correct goods receipt but negative stock, missing entries, entries on another location]