Move stock between locations
The three ways a transfer reaches Landara, why moving stock never changes what it cost or how old it is, and how to correct one you recorded wrongly.
Updated 3 August 2026
When stock moves from one of your locations to another, its cost has to move with it. Otherwise the location it left keeps a value for stock it no longer holds, and the location it arrived at reports units that cost nothing.
Landara handles this as a transfer: cost-neutral, no COGS, no new stock. Nothing was bought and nothing was sold, so nothing hits your profit and loss.
The three ways a transfer gets recorded
| How | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Shopify Transfers | You used Shopify's own Transfers feature. Landara picks it up when the transfer completes, with no step from you |
| Record transfer | The stock has already moved in Shopify and you just need the cost to follow. On Cost Layers |
| Reconcile pairing | One location is short by the amount another is over. Reconcile offers to pair them, and you confirm |
Use one, not two. If Shopify picks up your transfer automatically and you also record it by hand, the same stock moves twice. Check Dashboard → COGS → Ledger before recording one manually.
What a transfer does not change
It does not change what the stock cost. The units arrive at the new location carrying exactly the value they left with, to the cent, even when they came from several receipts at different prices.
It does not change how old the stock is. This one matters more than it sounds. Stock you received in January and moved in July is still January stock, so it still sells before goods that arrived at the new location in June. Moving stock around your own business does not make it newer.
This is why the order you sell in stays correct after a move. If a transfer re-dated stock, the receiving location would start selling its newest, and on a product whose cost has changed you would report the wrong COGS without anything looking wrong.
Choosing which batch moves
When you record a transfer by hand, Landara moves your oldest stock by default, because that is the order stock normally leaves a shelf. The Batch dropdown lets you say otherwise.
Use it when you know which delivery physically moved. If you shipped the pallet that arrived last week rather than the one sitting there since March, say so, and that receipt's cost is what travels to the other location.
It matters more than it looks. Getting it wrong sends the wrong cost to the destination and leaves the wrong cost behind, so both locations then value and sell their stock on a basis that does not match what is actually standing there. Nothing looks wrong at the time, because a transfer balances out overall either way.
Leave it on First in (FIFO) unless you genuinely know which receipt moved. Where you are not sure, oldest-first is the better assumption, and guessing is worse than the default.
Stock that arrived at a location by transfer is not listed in the dropdown. Those units may have come from several receipts at different costs, so there is no single batch to name. Moving them on uses oldest-first.
Correcting one you recorded wrongly
Wrong location, wrong quantity, or recorded twice. The fix is not to delete it.
Record the opposite move, then record the right one. This is ordinary accounting practice: you do not erase an entry, you reverse it. It is also how the rest of Landara works, because your movement history is a permanent record. An auditor can see what happened and what you did about it, which is the whole point of keeping it.
- Go to Dashboard → COGS → Cost Layers and open Record transfer.
- Enter the same SKU and quantity, with From and To swapped.
- Record it. The two movements now cancel out.
- Record the correct transfer.
A reversal lands you exactly where you started, including the age of the stock, so the next sale draws the same units it would have drawn if the mistake had never happened.
The same principle applies to a stocktake adjustment or a reconcile adjustment you got wrong. Record the opposite, then record the right one.
A move between two SKUs
Reassigning stock from one product code to another is not a transfer, and there is no single action for it yet. Do it on Reconcile: an out from the code it is leaving, and an in on the code it is joining.
Landara nets the two, so a reassignment correctly reports as no loss at all rather than as stock written off. What it will not do is record it as one deliberate move, so leave a note if it matters to whoever reviews your books.
