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Simple and advanced locations

Every warehouse site runs in one of two location modes: simple or advanced. The mode is set per site, so one organisation can run a simple back-room site and a fully slotted warehouse side by side. Simple is the starting mode for every warehouse site. Shop and virtual sites ignore the setting entirely.

Simple locations​

On a site using simple locations, each variant has one home location. Stock defaults in and out of that location, goods-in posts straight to it, and there is no putaway step — nothing is staged in a receiving location waiting to be placed. If a variant has no home location set at the site, received stock lands in the site's flagged default location, or, if no location is flagged as default, whichever active location at the site sorts first by sequence — with no check that the location can actually receive stock.

This is the right mode when the site is small enough that "where is it" has one answer per product, and the work of directing every pallet to a specific location would cost more than it saves.

Advanced locations​

A site using advanced locations gets full placement management: the same variant can sit in several locations at once, putaway tasks direct each receipt to a location, locations carry storage roles, and pick paths order the walk through the building.

Storage roles are the part most worth understanding. A location can be marked as a pick face — the forward location a picker is sent to — or as reserve, the bulk stock behind it that tops the pick face up. A location with no role set is general storage. Storage roles are only meaningful on a site using advanced locations; on a simple-mode site they have nothing to act on.

Advanced locations are what turn the other features on​

This is the consequence to know before you look for a feature and can't find it. Three items appear in the Inventory sidebar group only when your organisation has at least one active site using advanced locations:

  • Putaway
  • Replenishment
  • Licence plates

If no site is in advanced mode, those three are hidden from the sidebar altogether — not greyed out, not empty, absent. Switching a site to advanced locations is what makes them appear.

Transfers and Counting are different: they need only read access to inventory, so they are visible to everyone who can see stock, on simple-mode sites as much as advanced ones.

What this page does not cover​

Changing a site's location mode is a site setting, made where the site itself is set up. For what sites and locations are in the first place, see how Yessort models your warehouse and location types and behaviour.