What Is the Is-Stocked Flag in Inventory Planning? EDGEBIC Definition

The is-stocked flag in inventory planning is a product setting that marks whether the item carries physical inventory. When it is turned off, inventory netting, replenishment, and receipt or issue posting are all skipped for that product, so it never appears in the projected balance and never triggers a stock-based build. It is the clean line between items you hold on a shelf and items that have no physical stock at all, such as a service line or a phantom routing node.

This entry is part of the EDGEBIC by User Solutions glossary series; for the wider vocabulary of planning, see the manufacturing glossary. Whether an item is stocked interacts closely with its build policy, so read it next to make-to-stock vs make-to-order.

How the Is-Stocked Flag Works

The flag is a single yes-or-no setting on the product, and its effect is exclusion. When the flag is on, the product behaves normally: it is netted against demand, it can be replenished, and completed builds or consumed material post receipts and issues to its inventory ledger. When the flag is off, the product is quietly removed from all of that machinery.

That exclusion matters because not everything a plant sells or routes has physical stock. A service line, a labor charge, or a phantom assembly node exists in the data for pricing, structuring, or costing, but there is nothing sitting on a shelf to count. Running netting and replenishment against such an item would generate suggestions to build or buy something that has no meaning, and posting receipts or issues would move phantom quantities that only drift the ledger away from reality.

By skipping non-stocked items entirely, the projection stays focused on the products that genuinely have inventory to manage. The flag is therefore a data-hygiene control as much as a planning one: it keeps the projected balance and the ledger honest by keeping items that have no stock out of both.

A Concrete Example

Consider a shop that sells a physical bracket alongside an installation service. The bracket is a real product: it is machined, held in finished goods, shipped, and its on-hand quantity has to be planned. The installation service has no parts and no shelf; it is billed labor.

If both are flagged as stocked, the service line clutters the inventory projection, appearing in the projected available balance and potentially prompting nonsensical replenishment. The fix is to turn the service line's is-stocked flag off. From then on, netting, replenishment, and posting all skip it. The bracket keeps its full inventory treatment; the service quietly drops out of the stock machinery while remaining fully quotable and sellable.

The same logic applies to a phantom node in a routing that exists only to organize steps but is never held as stock. Flag it non-stocked and it stops pretending to have inventory.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

The is-stocked flag is a product-level switch that several parts of the planning engine consult before acting.

• Inventory netting skips non-stocked products, so they never enter the projected available balance roll-forward.
• Replenishment is suppressed for non-stocked items, so they never generate a build-to-stock suggestion regardless of their reorder settings.
• Receipt and issue posting is bypassed, so completing a build or consuming material for a non-stocked item does not move phantom quantities through the ledger.

A stocked product's movements are recorded in its inventory ledger, the audit trail of every receipt and issue. To see how a stocked product's demand can be satisfied from existing shelf quantity instead of new production, read what is consume-from-stock netting.