Van Stock & Site Custody: Inventory That Travels
The van is a warehouse that drives away; the site is a store with no walls — stock and equipment discipline for inventory that travels: loading transfers, nightly variance, site materials, and crew custody.
Inside the warehouse, stock control is a solved problem: locations, counts, documents. Then the stock gets into a van, or gets dropped at a construction site, or gets issued to a crew — and the discipline evaporates. "Van stock" becomes the driver's memory; "site materials" become whatever the foreman says remains; "crew tools" become a communal pool that shrinks. The fix is a single idea applied stubbornly: everywhere stock rests is a location, and every movement between locations is a recorded transaction.
Van stock: the daily loop
- Morning load-out: a transfer document, driver counts and signs — the van now holds its own stock, on the record.
- On route: every sale, delivery, and free issue decrements van stock at the moment it happens, offline if needed.
- Evening return: physical count back into the depot; the system computes the only number that matters: loaded − recorded movements − returned = variance.
- Attribution: the variance belongs to that van, that route, that day, that driver — small, named, and same-day, which is why it stays small.
Distributors who start this loop discover the same thing retailers discover with shift closes: the variances mostly stop within a month, not because thieves were caught, but because ambiguity ended.
Site materials: the store with no walls
| Failure mode | What it costs | The control |
|---|---|---|
| Deliveries straight to site, unrecorded | Nobody knows what arrived, so nothing can go missing — officially | Site receiving against the PO or transfer, by a named receiver |
| Materials consumed without job linkage | Job costing is fiction; overruns surface at final account | Issues recorded against the job/phase — the field version of recipe issuing |
| The site store as a communal pile | Cement walks, rebar shrinks, paint evaporates | A site storekeeper (even part-time), stock counted weekly |
| Leftovers at job end | Surplus vanishes or rots on site | Returns transferred back on the record; site closes at zero |
The job is the cost center
Everything that reaches a site should carry the job's identity — materials, equipment days, crew time, fuel. When the job closes, its true cost exists as a report, and the next quotation is priced from evidence instead of optimism. Contractors who run this discover their historical margins were 5–10% more imaginary than believed.
Crew custody: tools with names on them
- Tools and equipment issued to named people against signature — the custody principle that works everywhere it is tried.
- Per-job custody for the expensive kit (test instruments, generators, ladders): issued at dispatch, returned or re-confirmed at job close.
- A crew-kit checklist per vehicle or team, verified weekly in two minutes — the drill that keeps the drill.
- Exit clearance: no final dues until holdings are returned — the control that costs nothing and saves the most.
The weekly rhythm that holds it together
Thirty minutes, once a week
- Van variance trend by route — anything drifting up gets a ride-along.
- Site stock counts vs recorded balances, per active job.
- Open custody: who holds what, and what is overdue for return.
- Job material consumption vs estimate, for jobs past 50% completion.
- Returns and leftovers from closed jobs — back on the shelf, on the record.
Traveling stock is the hardest inventory there is — which is why it needs the offline-capable for stock and asset movement mobile capture, the fleet math, and the full field-operations discipline working as one system rather than three spreadsheets.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- A van or a site as a location, with its own on-hand position separate from the main store.
- Load-outs and returns as recorded stock transfers between locations.
- Counting a van or site location with blind entry and variance rules, which is how nightly reconciliation is actually enforced.
- Assets and tools with named custodians and movement history, distinct from consumable stock.
- Offline capture with a sync queue and conflict codes, for crews working out of signal.
- Signature capture on the movement itself — a mark with the signer's printed name and the time, on a load-out, a return, a stock issue or an asset handover, taken on a phone with no signal needed.
More we can add to your workspace
- A route or trip entity: a route, a leg and a delivery-run record. Movements are between locations today.
- A certified e-signature. A captured mark is handover evidence rather than a legal signing instrument, with no certificate and no eIDAS or ESIGN claim attached to it.
- Automatic reconciliation at end of day. A nightly variance is a count somebody runs, not something the system produces on a schedule.
- A per-person stock custody. Custody applies to assets, not to consumable stock — stock is held by a location, so "this crew owes this stock" is modelled as a van location rather than a person.
That last point is the one to design around, and it matters: if you want a named individual accountable for consumable stock, create a location per person rather than per vehicle. It works, it is slightly unnatural, and it is better to know now than to discover it in week three.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
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. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsCount the van like a warehouse
Load-outs, route movements, nightly variance, site materials, and crew custody — inventory that travels, finally on the record.
See van & site control in AWRAFrequently asked questions
Nightly van counts sound heavy. Can we count weekly instead?
A weekly count gives every variance seven days of possible explanations — which in practice means no explanation. The nightly count is ten minutes on a loaded van and less on a sold-down one; pair it with the fuel and cash close and the whole return ritual is under twenty minutes. Daily is the discipline; weekly is the decay.
How do we handle free issues, samples, and damaged goods on the route?
As recorded movement types with reasons — a sample issued, a damaged return, a goodwill replacement — each decrementing van stock under its own label. The variance number only means something when legitimate non-sales movements are captured instead of lumped into "shortage".
For construction sites, who plays storekeeper on a small job?
The foreman, formally — receiving and issuing on the phone against the job, with the weekly count done jointly with a visiting supervisor. The role matters more than the headcount: a named person whose numbers are checked beats an honest crowd with no records.
What about stock consumed by the crew itself — consumables, PPE, small tools?
Issue consumables and PPE to the crew as recorded issues (they are real costs of the job), and treat small tools below your asset threshold as crew-kit checklist items rather than registered assets. The goal is proportionate control — everything recorded somewhere, nothing important recorded nowhere.
