First, it is important to note that ABRA Flexi does not have a dedicated module for lending goods. It should also be noted that this guide does not cover the accounting aspects of the matter, but rather a possible technical solution within ABRA Flexi.

Is this guide right for me?

If your business involves lending goods to customers. This could apply to any service where customers rent your equipment, or situations where your employees take various goods or materials from the warehouse to a specific job and you need to track that outgoing stock.

In short, this guide covers any process where stock items leave your standard warehouse for the purposes of a business transaction or job, with the expectation that all or at least some of those items will be returned.

How do I record the entire process in Flexi?

Let's take a look at a possible workflow for implementing this process in Flexi.

We will need the following:

A virtual warehouse for loans, where borrowed goods will be tracked.
Warehouse document types configured to make the operation as automated as possible — one for issuing goods out of the warehouse, and one for returning goods back.
Creation of transfer documents between the standard warehouse and the loans warehouse. When goods are lent out, the transfer moves items from the standard warehouse to the loans warehouse. When goods are returned, the transfer moves them from the loans warehouse back to the standard warehouse.
Any additional details required for the loan. These may include, for example, a job order and a customer, or a responsible person.

Virtual warehouse for loaned goods

Let's look at the first point mentioned above. Loaned goods remain our property. They are still items whose value should be reflected in the appropriate warehouse account or at least included in the total warehouse value.

For this reason, it is necessary to create a virtual warehouse for loaned goods. Navigate to the warehouse list ("Goods - Warehouse List") and create a new "warehouse" for loans.

As described above, transfer documents will be created between the loans warehouse and the standard warehouse. We will cover the details further on in this guide.

Warehouse document types

To simplify the process, it is well worth creating new document types for these operations. Without them, you would need to manually fill in a number of details on each individual transfer document.

Navigate to the warehouse document types register, found under "Goods - Warehouse Document Types". Here, create two movement types for the transfer documents related to lending goods.

We need to cover two operations:

Lending goods – Creating a transfer document from the standard warehouse to the loans warehouse.
Returning goods – Creating a transfer document from the loans warehouse back to the standard warehouse.

The same document type can be used for both operations, as both essentially involve a stock transfer. Additional details — such as a job order, responsible person, or any text notes — are completed at the level of the individual transfer document.

Note:

There is nothing stopping you from creating separate document types for each operation — i.e., a dedicated type for issuing goods for a loan and receiving them into the loans warehouse, and a separate type for returning loaned goods, covering both the issue from the loans warehouse and the receipt back into the standard warehouse. This would result in a total of four document types.

First, create a document type with a name such as "Loan Goods Issue" and a code of "LOANS-ISSUE". This type will be used whenever goods are issued from a warehouse — whether from the standard warehouse or the loans warehouse. In a transfer document, issuing goods from a warehouse is always the first step.

The key fields are "Movement Type" and "Movement Type + Detail" (set this to "Issue for Transfer" so that Flexi recognises it as a transfer document). You can also optionally define the "Warehouse" field to specify the default source warehouse for the issue. However, if this document type is intended for general use, pre-filling this field may be counterproductive.

Next, create the receipt side of the transfer document — a warehouse movement type with a name such as "Loan Goods Receipt" and a code of "LOANS-RECEIPT". Here, the only key field is the movement type ("Receipt").

Now go back to the warehouse document type "LOANS-ISSUE" and fill in the "Transfer Document Type" field. This field is used to automatically determine which warehouse document type will be used to complete the transfer.

If the transfer document type is not specified here, Flexi will prompt you each time you create a transfer to select which document type should be used for the receipt into the target warehouse.

Transferring to the loans warehouse and back

Let's walk through an example transfer. We'll look at a scenario where, as a company, we provide a customer with a service that involves lending permanent equipment — which should be returned after the job is complete — as well as consumable materials that may be fully or partially used up during the job.

Open the "Receipts/Issues" register found in the "Goods" module and create a new record using the document type "LOANS-ISSUE". This will automatically populate the fields defined in the document type.

In the "Warehouse" field, enter the warehouse from which you want to issue the goods. In the "Target Warehouse" field, enter the warehouse to which the goods should be transferred upon completion of the transfer. Also fill in the company section with the customer who is borrowing the items.

All that remains is to enter the loaned items. Do this in the lower section of the form using the "Add" button.

If the document requires additional details — such as a job order under which the entire loan case can be tracked and analysed, various text notes, labels for categorising the loan, delivery locations for the customer, or a person responsible for the loan — all of these can also be filled in on the issue document.

Once everything has been filled in, you can save the issue document. On first save, Flexi will ask whether you want to complete the transfer immediately by receiving the goods into the target warehouse.

If you choose not to do so at this point, you can complete the transfer later via the services available on the issue document. In our example, we will confirm the creation immediately.

The result is a receipt into the loans warehouse containing the same items. Supplementary details such as the job order are carried over from the issue document to the receipt document in the target warehouse.

After saving the receipt into the target warehouse, you can monitor the updated stock levels of the relevant items in the loans warehouse. To do so, switch to the stock cards view, available in the "Goods" module.

By filtering on the specific warehouse in the stock cards header, you can see how much of each item is currently on loan. The overview always shows cumulative totals across all loan documents.

And how do you return loaned goods? In exactly the same way — simply swap the source and target warehouses.

Once this transfer is complete, the goods will be returned to the standard warehouse and the loaned stock level will be reduced accordingly.

There are various ways to track precise data, such as:

The difference between goods or materials issued for a loan and those that have been returned. Using custom queries, you can produce tailored outputs that display the required data filtered by customer, job order, or any other specific field.
If your customers have multiple delivery locations, you can create an output (again, a custom query) showing, for example, where the loaned goods are currently located. The input data would be the delivery locations specified on the transfer document from the standard warehouse to the loans warehouse.
If a responsible person is always assigned to each loan, you can create an output tracking which of your employees has not yet returned all goods for a given job order.
You can also create various custom reports (print templates) for printing from the relevant issue or receipt documents. These can serve as confirmation of the number of items received by a given customer or responsible person.