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Negative Balances in Inventory - why are they allowed? how can I prevent them?

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Mega Food

Hello,

I’ve noticed that Odoo allows users to record inventory transactions that exceed the actual available quantities, resulting in negative stock balances. I tried to resolve this through the system settings by looking for a feature that prevents negative inventory—either by treating the balance as zero or restricting it to positive values—but I couldn’t find such an option.

First, I would like to understand why Odoo permits negative stock balances, as this can cause control issues and make inventory management unreliable. Then, I need to find a solution to prevent this from happening, since I do not allow warehouse staff to process transactions that exceed available item quantities.

I use Odoo SaaS 19

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Mega Food
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Thank you, Chris, for the quick response. From my perspective, based on my experience in manufacturing companies and the need to ensure that actual stock balances are not exceeded, the stock balance should logically always be zero or a positive value. Having an alarm or preventing the system from proceeding until the negative balance is resolved helps address the issue immediately rather than discovering it later during stock monitoring.

On the other hand, I would expect at least some flexibility—allowing users to choose whether negative balances are permitted or not, depending on their specific rules and requirements not going to another options since Odoo at the beginning insight the users that most of features are covered through SaaS .

Chris TRINGHAM

Yes, I think I agree that it ought to be an option. Ideally by operation type.

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Chris TRINGHAM
Best Answer

In my experience, generally ERP systems do allow negative inventory balances.  

The reason is that what is in Odoo (or any other ERP) is a theoretical balance and actually you may have stock on the shelves.  

If someone in the warehouse is prevented from shipping a customer order because Odoo says there's no stock, that can be a problem.  Either they physically ship the goods and write that down on paper or in a spreadsheet (and maybe forget about it), or they don't ship the goods and you have poor customer service. 

Therefore you should regularly check for negative stock in Odoo, and arrange for that to be investigated as soon as possible.  If users are recording transactions incorrectly, you need to fix that.

There are 3rd party add-ons that allow you to block negative stock - that's not an option because you are using Odoo Online (SaaS) but Ray Carnes does have a possible solution for that here

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