The One Place This System Knows It Is Not Yours
An asset here can be owned, leased or borrowed, and that is enforced in five separate write paths. Stock cannot be anything but yours, because there is no field to say otherwise. Same product, same team, opposite answers to the same question.
The short version
If you hold goods that belong to somebody else — consignment, toll processing, cut-make-trim, bonded storage, repair intake — this product will value them as yours, count them as yours in a stocktake and include them in the figure you insure. The asset register would not make that mistake about a machine. Inventory has no field to make it with.
Ownership and custody are two questions, and most systems answer only the second because the second is the one that generates events. Something arrived, something moved, something left. Ownership generates nothing; it is a standing fact about a thing, and standing facts are exactly what data models forget.
What the asset register does
Every asset carries an ownership type. It defaults to owned. It is validated against three values — owned, leased, borrowed — and that validation is repeated in five separate places: the create request, the update request, the create-from-stock request, the API controller and the bulk importer.
Five is the number that tells you this was considered rather than inherited. Somebody thought about the import path and the API path, not just the form, which means somebody was thinking about how a wrong value could get in.
What inventory does
Nothing. There is no owner on an item, on an item location, on a batch, on a warehouse or on a location. A search across the application and every migration for any of the obvious names returns zero results.
There is a status on a stock location, with a reason and disposition fields. It is a condition concept: this stock is not currently usable. Ten values are declared and one of them is literally "consigned", which is closer than the rest of this product gets — and it was missed by the audit that first wrote this page up, because that audit searched for column names rather than for values.
It is still not an ownership field, for a reason worth being precise about. A status says this quantity is consigned. It cannot say whose it is, because there is no party on the other end of it — no customer, no supplier, nobody to report to and nobody to return it to. And a status is exclusive: stock marked consigned is not simultaneously available, so goods you hold on consignment and are expected to sell cannot be both.
The same question, asked of the two modules
Asset register
Answers it
- A field with three enforced values
- Validated in five write paths
- Defaults to owned, so a blank is a claim rather than an absence
- Visible on the asset, filterable in the register
Inventory
Cannot answer it
- No field on any of five candidate tables
- No third-party location concept
- Valuation sums everything on hand
- A stocktake counts everything on the racks
The asymmetry is not a gap in one module. It is two different beliefs about what the system is for, shipped side by side.
Three consequences, in cost order
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Valuation is wrong in two directions and they do not cancel
Goods on consignment sit in your stock value and should not. Your goods at a subcontractor left your stock at issue and are gone. One inflates, one deflates, and there is no reason on earth the two amounts would be similar.
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A stocktake counts the racks, not the ownership
The count is physically correct and financially wrong. Reconciling it means somebody remembering which racks do not count — which is a person, holding a fact the system does not, on a Saturday.
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The insurance figure is wrong in both directions at once
You are paying to insure material that is not yours, and not insuring material that is. Both are discovered at claim time, which is the worst possible moment to discover either.
Not a defect for most businesses, and we should say so
A business that owns everything it holds — most of them — is entirely unaffected by all of this. The default is correct for them and always has been. This page exists because the businesses it is wrong for are concentrated: contract manufacturing, repair, freight handling, and anywhere goods are processed for a customer who never lost title to them.
What you can do today
The workable answer is physical separation modelled as location separation. Create a warehouse or location for third-party goods, keep them there, and exclude that location from valuation manually. It is not a control — nothing stops a transfer into it or out of it — but it converts an invisible problem into a filter you can apply.
The unworkable answer is a category or a custom field. Both are attributes on the item master, and consignment is a property of a quantity in a place, not of a product. The same part number can be half yours and half a customer's on the same shelf, and no field on the item can represent that.
Four questions about third-party stock
Where does ownership live — on the product, or on the quantity?
A good answer sounds like
On the quantity, per location.
What it actually means
On the product is the wrong answer and a very common one. It cannot represent a mixed shelf.
Does the valuation report let me exclude an owner?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, as a filter.
What it actually means
If the only exclusion is by location, you are relying on physical discipline. Workable, but say it out loud.
What happens to my material at a subcontractor?
A good answer sounds like
It stays on my books, at a third-party location.
What it actually means
In ours it is consumed at issue and is simply gone. That is the mirror image of the consignment problem and it is less often noticed.
Does the asset module answer this differently from the stock module?
A good answer sounds like
No, they agree.
What it actually means
Ask it of both. Two answers in one product is the finding, and it took us until an audit to notice ours.
Two, and the second is the one people forget to ask for
This is a real project rather than a field, because ownership has to sit on the quantity and every valuation path has to learn about it. We would rather scope it honestly than add a column and call it done.
Ownership on the stock quantity
An owner on the location-level quantity — yours, a named customer, a named supplier — set at receipt and carried through moves. Then valuation, the stocktake reconciliation, the insurance report and the balance-sheet figure all learn to filter on it. The column is the small part; the paths that read it are the work.
A third-party location that is still yours
Material at a subcontractor should leave your building without leaving your books. That needs a location type that is external but in-scope for valuation, and an issue path that moves rather than consumes. Nobody asks for this until the first time they lose a pallet of their own material inside somebody else's factory.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. If you hold customer-owned goods, this is the conversation to have before the trial rather than after it.
Talk to us about third-party stockWhat AWRA OpsHub does today
- An ownership type on every asset — owned, leased or borrowed — validated in five separate write paths including the API and the bulk importer.
- Locations and warehouses, which can be used to segregate third-party goods physically and then filtered by hand.
- A stock condition concept on a location quantity, with a reason, a holder, a timestamp and a disposition — genuinely useful, and not an ownership field.
- A declared "consigned" status among the ten, settable by hand through the hold action. It marks a quantity; it names no counterparty and it makes that stock unsellable.
What it does not do
- Any ownership field on stock: not on the item, the location quantity, the batch, the warehouse or the location. The consigned status is a marker, not an owner — there is no party recorded on the other end of it.
- Anything that writes the consigned status automatically. A receipt never sets it; a person must.
- A third-party or external location concept. Material issued to a subcontractor is consumed and is gone.
- Any exclusion of non-owned goods from stock valuation, the balance sheet figure or the insurance report.
- A distinction, in a count variance, between your material and a client's.
Not ours, by choice
- The asset register having a real ownership field and inventory having only a status value is an inconsistency in our own data model. We are describing it rather than defending it.
- An earlier internal audit recorded inventory as having no consignment concept at all. That audit searched for column names and missed a status value; this page was corrected before it was published, and the correction is recorded here rather than made silently.
- The location workaround is discipline, not control. Nothing prevents a transfer across the boundary and nothing warns when one happens.
- Nothing here is Mauritian. Mauritius is here because an economy built on holding, processing and re-exporting other people's goods is exactly where this field's absence costs money.
Ask both modules the same question
Whatever you are evaluating, ask the asset module and the stock module whether a thing can belong to somebody else. If the two answers differ, you have found something the vendor does not know about their own product.
Talk about ownership and custodyFrequently asked questions
Could I use a custom field for consignment?
Only if a product is never both yours and a customer's at the same time, which defeats the purpose. Custom fields sit on the item master; ownership is a property of a quantity in a place. The location workaround is weaker but it is at least modelling the right thing.
Does the asset ownership field do anything beyond record-keeping?
It is a recorded fact, filterable in the register. It does not drive lease accounting or a return-to-owner workflow, and we would not describe it as doing either.
Why was this never noticed?
Because a business that owns what it holds sees correct numbers every single day. The absence is invisible until the first consignment arrangement, and by then the valuation has been trusted for years.
