Ask two people in a hotel "how much of this do we have?" and you often get two answers. The kitchen counts what is in its own store; the warehouse counts what is on the central shelf. Both are right — they are just counting different layers. Getting stock control right starts with seeing those layers clearly.

The operational problem

Most hotels track stock as one big number, so it never quite matches reality:

Something is "in stock" centrally but the department that needs it has none, and nobody can see the gap until service.
A count is corrected by overwriting the old figure, so the reason for the change disappears and the history can never be trusted.
Departments can order things they were never meant to handle, because access and stock are not connected.

The result is a number people argue about instead of a number they act on.

What Livion does instead

Livion models hotel stock in two layers. There is the central warehouse, and there is each department's own stock. An item can sit on the central shelf, in a department, or both — and Livion keeps the two apart so each figure means something.

Department inventory is where you see a single department's on-hand stock. Only departments that have been given warehouse access are selectable, and the view itself is read-only: you don't type a new number to change stock. Instead, quantities move through transfers between locations and departments, so the central and department layers always add up.

Department access is what decides which layer a department can even see. You assign categories and items to a department; selecting a category grants its items and the items in its descendant categories. That same access gates what the department is allowed to view and order, so a department only works with the stock that is genuinely theirs.

Underneath both layers is the stock movement ledger. Every change to an on-hand quantity — a confirmed delivery, a transfer, a return, an adjustment — is written as a movement. Nothing is silently overwritten: a correction is recorded as a new movement, so the running total and the reason behind it are always reconstructable.

Honest about scope

Livion tracks the movements you make; it does not count your shelves for you. The ledger is only as accurate as the deliveries, transfers and returns your team records — but once they are recorded, the numbers reconcile on their own.

Why it matters

When the two layers are separated and every change is a movement, the awkward questions get easy answers. You can tell whether a shortage is a central problem or a department problem. You can trace any figure back to the event that caused it. And because access and stock are linked, departments order against real, permitted items — which is exactly what makes deliveries, returns and reports downstream trustworthy.

This is the mental model the rest of Livion's warehouse is built on. Get it right once, and everything from reordering to month-end reporting gets simpler.

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