How ownership flips work
This page is for both the facility operator and brand tenants — an ownership flip is the moment stock stops belonging to one organisation and starts belonging to another, and it can happen without anybody in either organisation deciding to make it happen.
An ownership flip is a change of owner recorded against units that don't physically move anywhere. The stock stays in the same building, often in the same location; what changes is whose books it sits on. Stock changes hands between two organisations in exactly two circumstances.
Two ways stock changes hands
The first is a cross-organisation transfer. Someone raises a transfer on one organisation, and if, when it's confirmed, the lines it needs can't be covered from that organisation's own stock at the source site, Yessort draws the shortfall from a counterpart's stock of the same shared anchor instead. It records a transfer flip moving those units onto the transferring organisation's books. There's a transfer document you can open, and the flip is visible on it.
The second is a cross-organisation sale, and it has no transfer document at all. A customer order placed on one organisation needs more of a variant than that organisation holds, a counterpart has published supply covering the shortfall, and the allocation draws on it. Yessort records a sale flip: the counterpart's units become the selling organisation's, and the order fulfils from them. Nothing about this appears on a transfer, because no transfer exists. A supply link can be used this way without any transfer being raised.
Both kinds are the same thing to the balance you eventually settle. See intercompany settlement for how they're netted and turned into documents.
Both need an anchor
An ownership flip resolves the counterpart's stock through the shared anchor — that's the only way Yessort knows that your SKU and theirs are the same product. A variant with no anchor can't be traded at all. It can't be drawn on to cover a transfer, it can't fill a customer order from a counterpart's shelf, and no ownership flip will ever be written against it. If you expect a draw to have happened and it hasn't, the anchor link is the first thing to check.
Where the money shows, and where it doesn't
An ownership flip normally carries a price — the exception is a sale flip Yessort couldn't price, covered at the end of this page — and that price does real work: it relieves the selling organisation's cost of goods, and it blends into the buying organisation's weighted average cost.
A transfer flip is visible — but only to the organisation the transfer belongs to. If that's yours, open the transfer and it carries an Intercompany panel listing every flip on it, one row each, with the partner, what happened, the quantity, the Unit price and the Amount. The event reads Charged at confirm where the units flipped to the transferring organisation, Released back where a short-picked remainder went back to its owner, and Returned — credited where a return sent received stock back.
The counterpart whose stock was drawn can't open that transfer at all — a transfer belongs to one organisation, and only its members can see it. If you're on that side, the money reaches you inside Yessort the same way a sale flip's does: as part of the netted total on the intercompany settlement screen, never as a priced line you can inspect there.
A sale flip is invisible to both sides inside Yessort. There's no screen anywhere in the app that lists sale flips, none that shows what one was priced at, and none that shows what it did to either organisation's costing. In Yessort, a sale flip's money only ever surfaces folded into that same netted total per trading partner.
The detail does reach both organisations — just in their accounting systems rather than here. When the pair settles, the intercompany invoice and matching bill — or the credit-note pair, if the total runs the other way — each carry a line per SKU, described by SKU and product title, and both organisations receive their own document. So the itemised record exists; it lives in Xero, not in Yessort. Note that each line is posted as a single unit at the settled net amount for that SKU, so the quantity on the document isn't the number of units that changed hands.
A sale flip does not revert on a customer return
A sale flip is permanent. If a customer returns goods that were drawn from a counterpart's stock, ownership stays where the sale flip put it — the organisation that bought the units remains the owner, and the returned stock comes back onto its books, not the counterpart's. Yessort does not reverse a sale flip on a refund, and this is deliberate rather than a gap.
The commercial consequence is worth being clear about. A brand tenant that regularly sells a counterpart's product and takes returns on it will accumulate that counterpart's product as its own stock. It has bought those units and it owns them. If you want them back with the counterpart, that's an ordinary transfer between the two organisations, priced and settled like any other — not something a refund does for you. Plan for it if returns on cross-organisation sales are a meaningful part of your volume.
Don't over-apply this to the other kind. Transfer flips can flip back, and routinely do: a short-picked remainder released at dispatch returns to its owner at the same bin and price, and a shortfall returned to the owner is credited. Both cancel the original charge, and both appear on the transfer's Intercompany panel for the organisation that owns the transfer. It's the sale side that has no reversal path.
When a price can't be found
A sale flip is priced after the stock has already moved off the selling organisation, which means pricing can fail without stopping anything. If Yessort can't resolve an intercompany price — because no price list covers the item, or because the two organisations book in different currencies — the sale flip is recorded without one and the selling organisation is notified that intercompany settlement is being held.
The stock has still changed hands. What hasn't happened is the money: an unpriced sale flip sits waiting, counted but never valued, and it can't be settled until a price exists. See intercompany settlement for how these appear on the balance and what to do about them.