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The same question was posted yesterday on the old forum, I'm reposting here as OpenERP encourage to use the new QA site.

When defining a warehouse using the standard form you can assign it to just one company. Is it possible to define a warehouse that belongs to 2 companies so shops of whatever company can be supplied from the same warehouse?

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No - when the stock move happens which company gets the move journal?

We are newbies using OpenERP so terminology can be somewhat confusing for us. Talking to our manager he recommends to maybe have two companies that address their orders to a third company. This 3rd company will be the one directly managing the warehose. Can this be done? When creating a location input it is possible to use a location type Transit Location for Inter-Companies Transfers. Can be this used for this purpose?

Any other approach and/or advice on how to approach this situation will be welcomed.

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You cannot have Company A / Shop A and Company B / Shop B share the same Warehouse. Think of it from an accounting point of view: how could you tell to which company a given product belongs to?

We are speaking of "logical" warehouses here. From the ERP's point of view, you can have two warehouses corresponding to one physical building, and each company / shop using it's part of the warehouse. You will just have to teach your employees which receive and ship goods to be extra careful and to pick from the correct side of the inventory.

On the other hand, what you can have, is one Company with 2 shops and one warehouse. This works very well, both from a logistics and accounting point of view.

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Hmmm...I think I understood. In our case we have 2 companies, 2 shops and 1 warehouse. Products are common for both shops. I guess I should go for the logical warehouses solution. Can you point out where to find information about this setup? What is a "logical" warehouse? I see there are 4 virtual

I was not clear: you cannot do this. A company cannot sell products it does not own. To track the products that the company owns, you must put it in a OpenERP warehouse belonging to the company. The fact that this warehouse's building is physically shared with another company is irrelevant.

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Ok. But this is a common situation: companies sharing same warehouse and products but selling on different stores. I'm trying to achieve a configuration that allow us to manage this enviroment. After reading OpenERP books online I believe it can be achieved through virtual locations. Some advice?

Is it really two companies (different Organization numbers) or one legal entity with two names? Multi-company is mainly designed for cases where each company is a separate legal entity. As such the inventory got to be owned by one or the other with the need to create sales orders for passing the inventory to the other. If on the other hand it is one single legal entity, then the multi-company module might not be the right solution as it will cause accounting problems, such as valuation of stock. There are hacks make this module act as one company, though I recommend a multi-shop module instead

The reason being there are holding companies with multi-companies (legal entities) which each again can have multiple stores. If hacking the multi-company module to mean multi-shop it might work for some time, but you are now prevented from later adding a second legal entity.

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Our companies are indeed 2 different legal entities, managed from same place, sharing a physical warehouse, but selling in 2 different shops. Both shops sell to both retailers and to individual clients, sharing products from each other on the physical stock. Right now everything is done manually and currently we indeed issue sell orders between them. What I want to know is if this can be configured on OpenERP. If yes, then if it is easy to explain and how to accomplishj. Or maybe get more information on how to get more help or online resources on the subject. Thanks @Andresen-eConsulting

Then you can decide to create two warehouses with the same location, or have the warehouse itself owned by one of them and create a location within that warehouse which belong to the alternate company. The OpenERP book have some examples: http://doc.openerp.com/v6.1/book/5/5_14_Stock/5_14_Stock_inv.html and http://doc.openerp.com/v6.1/book/5/5_14_Stock/5_14_Stock_Location_Ex.html .