Track every ONU, router, cable spool, and SFP from purchase order to customer premise. Multi-warehouse, vehicle stock, contract-linked reservations, AI-scanned supplier invoices. Where equipment goes, the ledger knows.
An ONU arrives at the warehouse. A technician collects it for a Tuesday installation. The customer cancels Monday morning. The technician doesn't know yet, drives out anyway, brings the ONU home, plans to return it Wednesday. Wednesday becomes Friday. Friday becomes "where's that ONU we received six weeks ago?" The supplier invoice for it is paid; the customer who would have used it never existed; the warehouse believes it's still on its shelf.
Multiply this across thousands of devices, multiple warehouses, vehicle stock, supplier invoices, RMA flows, and field returns. Generic ERPs treat inventory as a SKU count; ISP operations treat each ONU as a serial-numbered asset that may be in transit, on a shelf, in a vehicle, in a customer's house, or in a damaged-return queue. The difference between those states is whether you can bill, whether you owe a refund, whether you're committing fraud against the supplier.
Each layer corresponds to a real state an asset can be in. Confusing two of them caused the problem above.
Purchase orders flow through draft, approval, and receipt stages. Goods Received Notes (GRN) reconcile against the PO with discrepancy flagging. Aelita's Smart GRN scanner parses photographed supplier invoices and pre-fills the GRN, highlighting line-item mismatches. A three-way match holds purchase order, supplier invoice, and goods actually received against each other — so you never pay for more than you ordered, or more than physically arrived.
Multiple physical warehouses with bin-level location tracking. Vehicle stock for field crews; equipment carried on a truck is its own stock location with its own balance. Stock transfers between warehouses tracked with dispatch and receipt confirmation. FIFO costing across the whole network so margin reports don't lie.
Each serial-numbered device has its own lifecycle: received, reserved, dispatched, installed, recovered, returned. The same serial cannot be in two places at once. Lost devices show up immediately because their last-known location stays on the dispatch record until reconciled.
When a sales contract is created with an installation date, the required equipment can be reserved against it from a specific warehouse. The reservation holds the device until install or cancellation. If the customer cancels, the reservation auto-releases. If the install proceeds, the reservation converts to a deployment record.
Damaged or faulty equipment enters an RMA queue. The supplier's warranty terms are tracked per device; eligible items are routed for replacement claims. Each RMA has its own lifecycle (raised, shipped, replacement received, closed) so the warehouse always knows whether a missing item is "lost" or "with the supplier."
Cyclic stocktake schedules per warehouse with variance reporting. Low-stock alerts per device class with configurable thresholds. Supplier-side reconciliation: the items the supplier shows as shipped vs the items we received and confirmed.
The system watches daily usage patterns per device class and warns before you run out — not after. When stock drops toward its reorder point, a reorder suggestion appears with the current quantity, days of stock remaining, a suggested order quantity, and a priority. Accept it and a draft purchase order is raised automatically; dismiss it if a delivery is already inbound.
Sell equipment to customers as a one-time hardware purchase — routers, mesh nodes, spare ONUs — without bending the recurring-billing model around it. A sales order moves from confirmed to picking to shipped, and at the picking stage the warehouse gets a guided picklist: what to pull, from which bin, in priority order, with serial numbers captured as each unit is picked.
Group items that always move together. An assembly consumes its components when built and becomes a single stocked unit; a bundle keeps components separate but sells as one line. For consumables and materials where the lot matters — cable reels, items with certificates or expiry dates — batch tracking records manufacture and expiry dates, quality status, and the supplier’s batch reference, with alerts before anything expires.
Every field technician carries their own virtual warehouse. Issuing stock to a crew is a handover the technician must confirm with two-factor verification before it counts as received — so a device is never “in the van” on trust alone. Going the other way, a collection request drives the retrieval of equipment from a customer at cancellation, upgrade, relocation, or fault, tracking the expected count against what actually came back.
Capture supplier invoices manually or let the AI invoice scanner read a photo or PDF — it extracts supplier, invoice number, date, line items, and totals with a confidence score, then suggests the matching purchase order. Record payments against each invoice, link bank transactions to mark bills paid automatically, and batch-tag invoice lines to the right accounting expense type. It is far more than OCR: the whole bill-to-payment trail lives in one place.
After goods are received, a guided putaway queue tells warehouse staff exactly where to store each item, using the preferred bins you configure per item. A barcode scanner identifies whatever it reads — serial number, MAC, item code, and status — so a device is recognised in seconds. And labels print one at a time or in bulk, so every serial and item leaves the dock tagged.
Stand up your catalogue fast. The import wizard onboards items in bulk from Zoho Inventory — both individual CSV exports and full Zoho backup ZIP archives — or from a plain CSV upload, so migrating from another system doesn’t mean keying in thousands of items by hand.
The old way. End of month. Two warehouse staff with clipboards walk every aisle, count every device class, write the totals, then someone types them into a spreadsheet and reconciles against an export from the billing system. Variances are investigated by emailing the field teams to ask whether anyone took something out and forgot to log it. The whole exercise eats a full Friday and most of Saturday morning.
What ISPCQ does. The cyclic stocktake schedule runs Tuesday and Thursday for the high-turnover device classes (ONUs, splitters), Friday for the rest. Staff scan barcodes against the running expected list; variances surface in real time. Vehicle stock auto-includes whatever was last logged from each crew's mobile device. Supplier-side reconciliation flags any "received" GRN that hasn't been confirmed as physically present.
The result. Friday afternoon stocktake takes 90 minutes. Variances under 1% of stock value, and the variances that exist are explainable (almost always: a vehicle that was off-route during the count window). The first month-end after switching, finance reduced the inventory write-off by enough to cover six months of ISPCQ licensing.