How negative stock happens
A location can end up holding a negative quantity: fewer than none. It is not a data fault, and it is not usually a counting mistake. It is the normal consequence of selling through a channel, and it is worth understanding before you meet it.
Why a channel can sell what you do not have
The figure Yessort publishes is floored at zero. A store cannot display minus four of something, so when you are short the store is simply told zero.
That is right for the storefront and unhelpful for you. Zero and minus four look identical from outside, so nothing on the store — and nothing in the figures the store shows you — indicates how short you are.
Meanwhile a store sells on what it was last told. Between one push and the next, an order can arrive for units already spoken for. Yessort records the order and the dispatch honestly, and the location it came out of goes below zero.
Why it needs its own queue
Because the published figure is floored, a shortfall is invisible on every screen that reports what a channel can sell. It does not show as a smaller number; it shows as zero, which is what you would expect if you had simply run out.
The Negative recovery queue, under Inventory, exists precisely for that blind spot. It lists locations sitting below zero — units that have gone out that Yessort has no record of ever holding.
A negative is a real state, not an error
Yessort records it honestly and never clamps it back to zero. That restraint is deliberate and hard-won: forcing a negative up to zero invents stock that was never there, which is how phantom units get created in the first place.
So a negative is not a fault to be cleared away. It is an accurate statement that units went out which Yessort has no record of ever holding.
How a negative settles
Two ways, and which one applies depends on what actually happened.
A refund. The sale reverses, and the book walks back towards zero on its own. Nothing for you to correct — the units were never there and now the sale agrees.
A count that finds the stock. The units were physically present and the record was wrong: a delivery received late, or stock moved without being recorded. Counting the location puts the record right.
The channel exposed the gap; it did not create it. Left alone, negatives distort what the site is holding and suppress the figures published to every channel mapped to that site. See recover negative stock.