Locations

A location is a physical place where inventory is kept and from which orders are shipped: a warehouse, a store or a returns centre. Every bin location, tote, container and inventory item belongs to one location. Orders are allocated to a location, pick lists and shipments are made per location, and many settings can be set differently per location.

This page covers creating and maintaining locations in Admin › Warehousing › Locations. That screen is available to admins only.

The locations list

The list shows the locations that belong to the current account, plus the locations that are shared with it. Columns: Name, Account (when the current account has child accounts), Company name, Address, Postal code, City, State or province, Country and State. The Inventory action on each row opens the inventory overview filtered on that location in a new tab.

Creating a location

1. Switch to the account that should own the location. A location's account cannot be changed later.
2. Go to Admin › Warehousing › Locations and click Create.
3. On the Attributes tab enter:
   • Name: the name users see in the location selector, on orders and on pick lists. Imports and integrations can refer to a location by this name, so keep it short and stable (for example NL-AMS-1).
   • Accessible by accounts: the child accounts that may use this location (see below).
   • Time zone (required).
4. On the Contact tab enter the address of the location. Last name, postal code, city and country are required.
5. Optionally fill in the Billing contact tab.
6. Click Save, then Activate in the card menu. A new location starts in the state concept.

What happens automatically

When a location is created, Boxture creates four bin locations in it:

Bin location	Purpose	Name taken from setting
PICKING	Picking	Warehousing › Picking bin location name
PROBLEM	Problem	Warehousing › Problem bin location name
RECEIVING	Receiving	Warehousing › Receiving bin location name
KITTING	Kitting	Warehousing › Kitting bin location name

The names shown are the defaults; if the settings have been changed for the account, those names are used. These bin locations are the defaults for receiving, problem handling (for example when unpicking) and kit building. Add the rest of the warehouse's bin locations afterwards; see Warehousing setup.

Why the time zone matters

All times that are "local to the location" use the location's time zone:

• the Shipping › Cutoff time and Carrier › Pickup time, which together decide the planned ship date of an order when it is allocated;
• the working days and holidays used to count business days.

See Cutoff and SLA for how the ship date is calculated.

Sharing a location with other accounts

A location belongs to one account. Use Accessible by accounts to let other accounts use it as well. You can only choose active accounts at or below the location's own account in the account hierarchy.

A location is available in an account when it belongs to that account or that account is listed in Accessible by accounts. This decides:

• which locations appear in the location selector when the user works in that account;
• which locations an order of that account can be allocated to or received in;
• which locations can be chosen in location-specific settings and holidays for that account.

Because an account can only be switched to when it has a location the user can access, share at least one location with every account that should be used.

A typical 3PL setup: the warehouse operator account owns the warehouse location and lists all client accounts in Accessible by accounts. Each client then sees only its own orders and inventory, but in the shared warehouse.

Which locations a user can use

A user can use the locations that are available in the accounts they can access. To restrict a user to some locations, fill in Accessible locations on the user's Security tab; see Users and roles.

Contacts

Tab	Purpose
Contact	The address of the location. It is the default sender (origin) address of shipments from this location and the destination address of transfer orders to it.
Billing contact	Billing address of the location
Other Contacts	Any number of additional contacts with a kind (shown after the first save). Use Add contact to add one.

To ship from this location with a client's own sender address, add a contact of kind Origin for location to the client's account. See Accounts.

Bin management

On the Bin management tab, Pick start bin location sets where a picker starts. When Boxture orders the lines of a pick list into a walking route, it starts from this bin location (or from the picker's current bin location when the route is recalculated during picking). Without it, the route starts at the first bin location of the pick list. See Pick lists.

Warehouse layout

After the first save, the Warehouse Layout tab shows a 3D map of the location's bin locations. Bins are drawn from their walkway, aisle, rack, shelf and bin coordinates; bin locations without these coordinates (or with a value below 1) are not shown. You can select a bin to see its walkway, aisle, rack, zone and shelf.

Navigation:

Action	Mouse	Touch
Rotate (orbit)	Left mouse drag	One-finger move
Zoom (dolly)	Middle mouse drag or mouse wheel	Two-finger pinch
Pan (truck)	Right mouse drag	Two- or three-finger move

The map is a quick way to check that the bin location coordinates are entered correctly; the same coordinates are used to calculate pick routes.

Meta Data

The Meta Data tab has Notes (free text) and Metadata (YAML). Metadata is used by integrations and can be used in message and paper templates.

Location states

State	Meaning
concept	New location, not yet in use
active	In use
disabled	No longer in use

Use Activate and Deactivate in the card menu. Only active locations are offered when choosing a location on an order.

Related pages

• Warehousing setup – bin locations and totes
• Bin locations
• Holidays
• Warehousing settings