Warehouse mangagement

Warehouse overview

If you've worked with the Marketplace and Inventory sections in equipme, you're used to items being assigned to a specific employee. But not every item is always in someone's hands. Devices get returned, new hires haven't started yet, or you simply want to keep a few spare laptops ready at a location without tying them to a person. Warehouse management is where those items live.

Think of it as your own internal stockroom, separate from the provider's stock. When an item isn't assigned to anyone, it doesn't just vanish from the system. It moves into your warehouse, where you can see it, reserve it, or send it out again whenever it's needed.

Every location has its own warehouse

This is the part that trips people up at first, so it's worth explaining clearly. You don't set up a warehouse separately somewhere in settings. Every location you've created in your company, for example Frankfurt, Headquarters Berlin, or Sales Office Hamburg, automatically comes with its own warehouse attached to it. When you look at delivery or storage options, you'll see both the location itself, like Frankfurt, and its warehouse variant, Frankfurt (Warehouse), listed as separate entries.

The difference between the two is simple. Frankfurt as a location is where people work and where devices are assigned to employees. Frankfurt (Warehouse) is the internal stock for that same office, items sitting there aren't in anyone's hands yet, but they belong to that location and can be handed out from there once needed.

Getting an item into your warehouse

Items usually end up in the warehouse in one of two ways.

The first is through a return. If an employee leaves, gets a new device, or simply hands something back, you have to decide what happens to it next. Open the item in Inventory and select Store service. You'll be asked to choose between External and Internal. External sends the item back to the provider, meaning it leaves your company's stock entirely. Internal keeps it with you, and this is the option that routes it into your own warehouse instead.

Once you confirm this, you'll see a short confirmation message telling you the return request was successfully transmitted. This isn't the final step though. The item doesn't teleport straight into the warehouse, it first goes through a small processing step.

You'll find it waiting under Offer Management → Order processing, listed as an open position with a status like "Return request." Select it and choose Complete directly to actually carry out the return. Only after this step does the item show up in Warehouse management, now sitting at the warehouse of whichever location it was returned to.

It's a bit more involved than a single click, but the reasoning behind it makes sense once you see it. Splitting "I want to return this" from "this return is now processed" gives whoever manages order processing a chance to catch mistakes or handle exceptions before stock officially changes.

What you can do with an item once it's in the warehouse

Once an item is sitting in your warehouse, select it and open the Actions menu. Depending on your permissions, you'll see some or all of the following:

Reserve lets you set an item aside for a specific group or department, for example Marketing, without assigning it to one particular employee yet. This is useful when you know a team will need a device soon, but you don't know exactly who it's going to.

Request provision is how you send the item back out. You'll be asked to pick a delivery location, and here again you'll see both regular locations and their warehouse counterparts in the list. This is what you'd use once you've decided the item should go to a specific office or be prepared for handout there.

Assign add-on lets you attach an additional service to the item, for a laptop, that might be something like an extended warranty or an accessory bundle.

Move service moves the item from one location's warehouse to another. If you have spare monitors sitting in your Frankfurt warehouse but your Munich office needs them more urgently, this is how you'd relocate them. Under the hood, it works exactly like changing who an item is assigned to, the only difference is that both sides of the move are locations instead of people.

Please confirm receipt turns on a confirmation step for whoever the item is being sent to next. Instead of the process ending once your side marks it as delivered, the recipient gets a notification and has to actively confirm that the item actually arrived. This matters most when items are shipped directly to someone, at a different office, working remotely, or simply somewhere you can't personally hand it over. Without this, you'd only know that your side considered the delivery finished, not whether it actually reached the person it was meant for.

The bigger point behind all of this is that nothing just disappears once it's no longer assigned. A returned laptop, a spare monitor, a device waiting for a new hire to start, all of it stays visible and usable instead of turning into an unknown quantity somewhere in a cupboard. You can see exactly what you have, where it currently sits, and move it to wherever it's needed next, all without creating a new order or involving the provider again.