What is Asset Stock?
Asset Stock is for capital items you hold several of and issue as needed — ten spare laptops in the store room, a reel of network cable, three replacement pumps on the shelf.
Asset Stock is not Consumables
This is the distinction people get wrong, and it decides which module you should use.
| Asset Stock | Consumables | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Capital held in quantity | Supply that gets used up |
| After it leaves the store | Still an asset you own | Gone |
| Examples | Spare laptops, replacement motors, network switches | Filters, toner, fasteners, cleaning materials |
| Audit trail | Full ledger — every movement, with a reason and a running balance | Simpler quantity tracking |
A spare laptop issued from the store room is still a laptop the organization owns. A filter fitted to a machine is consumed and gone. That difference is why they are tracked differently.
Tip If you would want to know where the item went after it left the store, it is Asset Stock. If you only care that the level does not run out, it is a Consumable.
Requirements
- Available on: Nova, Orbit, Odyssey, Cosmos
- Roles: Owner, Admin, Manager to create and move stock
Asset Stock is available on every plan, including the free one.
What a stock record holds
Alongside the standard asset fields — name, description, category, location, department, manufacturer, model, vendor, status — a stock record carries:
- Quantity — how many you hold
- Minimum threshold — the level at which a low-stock alert fires
- Unit — pieces, boxes, metres, whatever you count in
The ledger
The quantity is never edited directly. It is the running result of a ledger, and every movement is a row in it.
| Movement | What it means | Reason required |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | The starting balance. Exactly one per item, always first. | — |
| Issue | Stock leaving the store | Yes |
| Return | Previously issued stock coming back | No |
| Adjustment | A stock count correction | Yes |
Each row records who, when, why, how much, and the resulting balance.
This is the point of the module: any balance can be explained by reading its history. If the count is wrong, you can see exactly which movement caused it rather than reconstructing what might have happened.
Reasons are not optional
Issues and adjustments require a reason. That is deliberate.
A stock discrepancy explained at the moment it is recorded is useful. The same discrepancy explained three months later, from memory, is guesswork. Requiring the reason up front is what makes the ledger worth having.
Low stock alerts
When the quantity falls to or below the minimum threshold, UniAsset raises a low-stock notification. See Low stock alerts — the alerting works the same way for both modules.
What Asset Stock is not
UniAsset is not a warehouse management system. Asset Stock tracks quantity held through an auditable ledger. It does not provide:
- Bin-location tracking
- Pick-and-pack workflows
- Shipping and receiving
Organizations needing those should pair UniAsset with a dedicated warehouse system.
Common mistakes
Creating twenty individual asset records for twenty identical spare keyboards. That is what Asset Stock is for. Individual records are for individually identified things — one laptop, one forklift.
Using Asset Stock for supplies that get consumed. Filters and toner are Consumables.
Trying to correct a quantity by editing it. You cannot. Record an Adjustment with a reason — that is how a corrected balance stays explainable.
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