Setting Up a New Warehouse
If you've checked out our Getting Started with Resources article, you know that a warehouse is a place where you store your inventory items. This might be a shed, barn, silo, tank, refrigerated storage, closet within a building, or even a storage facility off your property like a grain elevator. Warehouses can also be optionally subdivided into bins, which allow you to be more granular with your inventory storage. You might keep your fertilizer in your barn, but knowing what section of the barn it's in may help you find it faster. You'll be able to track the capacity of the warehouse and bins as well, and filter for what can be stored in each unique warehouse.
To create a new warehouse, navigate to Resources in your left menu, and then select Warehouses. From the main Warehouse page, click the button for New Warehouse. You'll need to give your warehouse a name, an optional internal ID. Then you will choose how to track capacity and filter for what can be stored in the warehouse.
Tracking Capacity
If you choose to track capacity in separate bins, you'll be able to create subsections of this warehouse to store inventory items. This is great for things like cabinets and shelves, or could be used for areas and sections of the warehouse like the loft or backroom. Each individual bin can have its own capacity. In the example below we added 2 bins to our Southside Storage Warehouse. Bin A has a capacity of 50 lbs, and we filled it with carrots. Bin B had a capacity of 75 pounds and we partially filled it with jalapeno peppers.You'll define the bins by clicking Add Bin after you save the warehouse record overall.
If you choose to track capacity only in this location, the entire warehouse has a single capacity. This would be useful for something like a silo, tank, or hay storage barn. See in the example below that we added a 4500 pound capacity to our cattle feed silo, and that a capacity gauge is shown across the top of the warehouse homepage to indicate how much of that capacity has been used. This is effectively one large storage area not divided into separate sublocations.
Be aware that you can add items beyond the max capacity of a bin or warehouse. If you do this, you might not see all of the items in the bin shown in the percentage bar. An "!" icon will be displayed alerting you to this. If you need to increase the max capacity, just select the bin or warehouse and add a larger amount. Below you'll see that we actually fit more pounds of broccoli than expected in bin 2, so we increased the maximum to give us a better visual representation of it's capacity.
Filtering Your Warehouse
You can also optionally filter your warehouse to limit what types of items can be stored there. This connects with your inventory item categories, so you'll be sure that you store those items in their correct places. If you don't need this, you can simply choose Any Inventory Category and the warehouse will be able to store any item.
Choosing the option to Limit Inventory Categories will present an additional menu for you to pick from a set of categories. These selections determine what types of inventory items can be stored in this warehouse. You might have a warehouse dedicated specifically to chemicals, fertilizers, and hazardous materials, which you might want to keep separate from your harvest yields! Pick as many categories as you'd like. When adding items to this warehouse, only the items in these categories will be available to select. Note that this is available at the warehouse level overall, not in each separate bin.
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Now that you have created your warehouses, you can now use them to store your inventory items. You might explore more options in this section to see warehouse history or learn how to map the warehouse, or move on to the inventory section to create your first item. You can also learn more about working with warehouses here.
A note about our examples in this article - The Farmbrite Warehouse and Bin system is designed to be highly customizable. You can use these however you see fit to meet your needs. How you use these two levels of inventory tracking is up to you!
Reach out to our customer support if you have any questions about creating warehouses and bins!