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How transfers work

A transfer moves stock from one of your sites to another inside the same organisation — warehouse to shop, warehouse to warehouse, shop back to warehouse. The two sites must be different, and the transfer is the record of the whole journey: what was asked for, what the source could actually send, what left, and what arrived.

Yessort numbers every transfer TRF- followed by six digits, so the first one reads TRF-000001. That format is fixed — transfer numbering can't be customised, and the document numbering settings that apply to orders and purchase orders don't reach transfers.

The four steps​

A transfer moves through Draft, Open, In transit and Completed. Each step does something different to your stock.

Draft is the building stage. Lines can only be added, edited or removed while the transfer is a draft, and a transfer needs at least one line before it can be confirmed.

Confirm takes the reservation and holds the stock. Yessort reserves the full requested quantity at the source site and holds it at specific source locations — the pickable locations that actually have the stock, honouring the line's lot if one was chosen. Nothing physically moves yet: confirm writes no stock movement, only the hold. If the source can't cover the full request, Yessort confirms with what it could hold and reports the difference — see transfer shortfalls.

Dispatch is the units leaving. Yessort relocates the held stock out of its source locations into the source site's in-transit location, which is where the units sit for the whole journey. Dispatch sends everything held in one go and releases the rest; if a pick run has already worked the transfer, it sends what was picked.

Receive is what lands the stock at the destination. This is the only step that puts stock on the destination site. Receiving is normally partial-friendly: key what actually arrived, and the remainder stays in transit to be resolved. At a destination using advanced locations, the stock stages into the receiving location and raises a putaway task, exactly as a goods receipt does. At a destination using simple locations, it lands straight in the variant's usual location. Only a virtual destination holds the stock at site level, with nothing to put away. Damaged units are the exception, and can only be keyed on a receiving session: they go to the destination's quarantine location and are never put away — or, at a virtual destination, they sit at site level like everything else there.

Completion is worked out, not clicked. There is no Complete button. A transfer completes on its own once every dispatched unit has been accounted for — received at the destination, returned to the source site's stock, or written off.

What the stock figures show at each step​

This is the part that surprises people, so it's worth being exact. Three different numbers move at three different moments.

At confirm, the source site's Available falls. The units are reserved for the transfer, so they stop being sellable. Nothing else changes: on-hand is untouched, and the destination shows nothing yet.

At dispatch, the source site's on-hand falls. The per-site stock breakdown treats units in transit as gone from the site that sent them, so the source's on-hand drops by the dispatched quantity as soon as the transfer leaves.

The destination shows the units as Incoming before they arrive. The destination site's row appears in the per-site breakdown even when it holds no stock there at all, with the dispatched units shown as Incoming. Two things to know about that figure: the destination gains no on-hand until the transfer is received, and Incoming is not a transfer-only number — it also includes anything still expected on an open purchase order, in the same total.

Organisation-wide on-hand does not dip. Across the organisation the units are still on hand for the whole journey — they sit in the non-sellable In transit bucket until they are received. So the variant's total on-hand is unchanged by a transfer, while its per-site split changes twice. For what each bucket means and which of them are sellable, see stock quantities.

Where to go next​