Orbit Inventory
RBAC category: Inventory Management — 10 modules, 52 permissions
Routes: /org/inventory/* · Audience: staff only — there is no customer-facing surface
1. What Orbit Inventory is
The module that answers what do we sell, what is it made of, and where did the stock go.
It is easiest to understand as two halves that share one catalogue and almost nothing else:
| Catalogue | Operations | |
|---|---|---|
| Screens | Units, Categories, Attributes, Products, Raw Materials | Procurement, Production, Sales, Maintenance & QC, Ledger |
| You are | authoring what exists | recording what happened |
| Writes to | The product and material masters | The transaction ledger |
| Changes when | Someone adds a dish, a size, a recipe | Stock arrives, is cooked, is sold, is counted or is thrown away |
The catalogue half is where a storefront's products come from. The operations half is a stock journal. They do not share a stock number — see How stock is counted, which is the single most important page in this set.
Don't confuse Inventory with Storefront
| Orbit Inventory | Orbit Storefront | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns | The product, its variations, its price, its recipe | The selling of that product |
| Screens | /org/inventory/* | /org/ecom/* |
| Typical question | "Add a 6-piece size to Bhetki Paturi" | "Why hasn't order ORD-0042 shipped?" |
| Packages, coupons, orders | ❌ | ✅ |
A product is authored once, in Inventory, and sold many times, in Storefront. If you are looking for a bundle of products at a combined price, that is a package and it lives in Storefront.
2. How the ten modules fit together
The dotted line on the right is real. A storefront order changes current_stock on the variation
and writes no ledger row; an Inventory operation writes a ledger row and never touches
current_stock. The two halves of that diagram do not reconcile.
This is not a subtlety you can defer — it changes what every stock figure in the product means. Read How stock is counted before trusting any number.
3. The modules
Catalogue
| Module | Route | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of Measure | /org/inventory/uom | The units everything else is counted in. Configure first |
| Product Category | /org/inventory/category | A nestable classification tree, also used by the storefront |
| Product Attributes | /org/inventory/attributes | Reusable option sets — Spice Level, Serving Size — that become variations |
| Orbit Products | /org/inventory/products | The catalogue itself |
| Raw Materials | /org/inventory/rawmaterials | The material master, and what recipes are built from |
Operations
| Module | Route | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement & Inbound | /org/inventory/procurement | Recording stock arriving from vendors |
| Production & Manufacturing | /org/inventory/production | Turning raw materials into finished goods against the BOM |
| Sales & Outbound | /org/inventory/sales | Walk-in POS and offline B2B invoices |
| Maintenance & Quality Control | /org/inventory/maintenance | Physical-count corrections and wastage |
| Inventory Audit View | /org/inventory/ledger | Every movement, in one list |
4. Where Inventory shows up elsewhere
| Surface | What it uses |
|---|---|
| Storefront product pages | Products, their variations, images, categories and attributes |
| Storefront packages | Products bundled at a combined price |
| Storefront "Sold out" | The variation's current_stock — not the ledger |
| Finance / tax | Each product carries a tax category, chosen here but defined in Finance |
| Cockpit | Stock-value and low-stock tiles — see Inventory in the Cockpit |
| External API | Six inventory:* scopes — see External API |
5. Before you start
Inventory screens are project-scoped. Without a project selected in the Platform Context chip, every list renders empty — not an error, just nothing. If a screen you expect to have data looks blank, check the chip first.
Two more things worth knowing on day one:
products.view gets you the catalogue list and nothing else. The product detail route is gated on
products.edit and the create route on products.create — there is no read-only product page.
Units, Categories, Attributes, Raw Materials and Products each carry a …createwithai permission
and their own generator. They share one review pattern, documented together in
AI-assisted creation.
6. Where to go next
| If you are… | Start at |
|---|---|
| Setting up a new tenant | Getting started |
| Adding a product | Products → Product editor |
| Building a recipe | Bill of materials |
| Receiving stock | Goods receipts |
| Manufacturing | Production |
| Chasing a number that looks wrong | How stock is counted · Troubleshooting |
| Assigning permissions | Permissions |