Move parts between your locations without losing what they cost

If you run more than one location, Automan treats moving goods between them as a recorded transaction rather than a message in a group chat. One shop sends, the other confirms what actually arrived, and the cost of those parts travels with them instead of being reset to zero. It is also not something you buy: the menu appears on its own once one account holds more than one active Store App.

The part you need is sitting in your other shop

It happens weekly, and it looks different depending on the trade.

In an auto workshop, one site ends up long on timing belts and spark plugs for a model it barely sees any more, while the second garage across town turns work away because the same parts are out. The money left the business at purchase. The only thing that has not happened is the ten-kilometre journey.

In an electronics repair shop, the pattern usually runs the other way. The counter that buys screens and batteries in bulk builds up a drawer of one model, and the second kiosk runs dry mid-week — right when a customer is standing there with the handset.

The old fix is always the same: a phone call, a part carried across town, and nobody writing it down. A month later both locations claim the same stock, both profit figures are wrong, and nobody can explain where five batteries went.

Sent, Received, Cancelled: a flow that matches what physically happens

Automan keeps the flow short and tied to the goods, not to office procedure.

1. Sent. The origin shop picks the items and quantities. Stock leaves that shop immediately and sits in transit, so no unit is ever counted twice across two locations.
2. Received. The destination confirms, not the sender. Partial receiving is allowed and normal: ship ten oil filters, eight turn up, eight go into stock.
3. Cancelled, or recorded as a loss. Whatever never arrived is closed out — cancelled so its value returns to the sending shop, or written off so it becomes an expense with a date on it.

Notice what is missing from that list: an approve button. There is no approval workflow here, and that is deliberate. What validates a transfer is not a manager’s signature but reality — the goods either arrived or they did not. Because the confirmation sits with the receiving shop, you stop accumulating shipments that were “sent, apparently” and never showed up in anyone’s stock.

Cost travels with the goods

This is the part that informal record-keeping destroys quietly.

When you send, stock at the origin is consumed under that shop’s inventory costing method — FIFO or Average, whichever you run — and the value that comes out of that calculation is what creates the new lot at the destination. Nothing is zeroed, nothing is rounded off, nothing has to be typed in by hand.

Why it decides more than it looks like it does: if goods arrive valued at nothing, the receiving branch appears to be handed free inventory. Its margin looks better than it is, the sending branch looks worse than it is, and you end up deciding which location deserves more capital on the strength of a number that was never true. It is the same principle that governs spare parts inventory: stock without a correct value is not data, it is a tidy guess.

Journals post themselves, in both sets of books

“Properly recorded” is meant literally here. Each stage of a transfer posts entries at cost in the books of both shops:

You do not need to read a trial balance for this to work. But if you do — or your accountant does — the entries can be opened and inspected through repair shop accounting. That is the difference between a system saying so and a number you can follow.

Open a second location without retyping the catalogue

The exhausting part of opening a branch is not moving the workbench. It is rebuilding the data. Copy Products & Categories removes most of that.

• What copies: the product list along with its categories, subcategories, and brands. The structure of your catalogue comes across, not just a list of names.
• What does not copy: stock. Products arrive with a quantity of zero. We say that bluntly because it is the expensive misunderstanding — physical goods move through Inter-Store Stock Transfer, never through a copy.
• How it decides, product by product: anything already copied is skipped, or has its price refreshed if you ask for that. A SKU that already exists at the destination is linked rather than duplicated, so both shops are talking about the same item. Everything else is created new.
• There is a dry run. It calculates what would be created, linked, and skipped, and writes nothing at all. You read the result, then decide.

Copy Store Settings, with one brake we will not release quietly

The trading rules you spent years tuning can come across too — whitelisted fields only, not a wholesale overwrite of the new shop.

One exception is intentionally hard to sail past: inventory settings are skipped when the two shops use different costing methods and the destination already holds stock. The reasoning is blunt. Changing the costing method of a shop that is already trading rewrites the cost of goods already on its shelves and the profit already reported on them. We would rather decline to copy a single setting than reshape your margins as a side effect.

“Will the app cope with more than one branch?”

It will, because Automan does not force every location into one crowded pool of data. Each branch runs as its own Store App with its own stock, its own till, and its own books — exactly as it did when you had one shop. Multi-branch adds bridges between them, nothing more: transfer, copy products, copy settings.

Control stays yours. Who may send, receive, or copy is set through per-user access rights. A branch manager can be trusted to receive shipments without also being handed the store settings.

One boundary worth knowing before you plan: a single Store App serves one kind of unit — general electronics or vehicles. So if your two locations are different trades, say a motorcycle workshop and a phone repair counter, they run as two Store Apps under one account. That is not a limitation we bury in a footnote; it is how the app keeps its terminology and workflow matched to the work actually done at each site.

“Setting up a new branch will take days”

The days go into building the lists — unit types, services, product categories, brands — and that is exactly the part that can be shortened.

A new Store App starts with the guided initial setup — the Business Type Wizard — six steps in order: Store, Units, Service, Products, Notes & Rules, then Review. Every recommendation can be thrown out and replaced with your own if the new site works differently.

After that, Copy Products & Categories brings the catalogue over and Copy Store Settings brings the rules. What is left is the one job that must stay manual and should never be delegated to software: counting what is physically on the shelves at the new location.

What changes from the owner’s chair

Dead stock stops being a silent loss. A part that landed at the wrong site can move the same day with its cost intact, instead of sitting there until the model stops coming in.

Branch numbers become comparable. Because cost is not zeroed in transit, each location’s margin rests on the same footing. Comparing site A with site B finally measures performance rather than measuring who happened to receive “free” goods.

“Where did it go?” has an answer. Every shipment carries a status — sent, received, cancelled, lost — and even the losses are booked as an expense. Unpleasant, and still far better than a mystery variance surfacing at the next stock count.

Before you sign up, two honest notes

Automan was built in Indonesia and is priced there: Lite at Rp 0 and Pro at Rp 15,000 per month, with no separate USD list. Support runs in Bahasa Indonesia. The vehicle catalogue ships seeded with brands common across Southeast Asia, which makes it a natural fit in that region and a partial one elsewhere — you can delete every seeded entry and enter your own, but we would rather you knew the starting point.

None of that changes how transfers behave. It does change whether we are the right fit for you, and you deserve to weigh that before you spend an evening on setup.

If the second location already exists — or opens next month

The cheapest way to test any of this is on your own data: activate a second Store App under the same account and watch the transfer menu appear without asking anyone. Send one item, receive part of it, and open the journal on both sides.

Not there yet? Walk through the repair workflow demo to see how a single transaction reaches the reports, and check what each plan covers on the pricing page.