Next Inventory is a full-featured inventory management component that replaces spreadsheets with a proper audit-logged system. Track assets checked out to staff, consumables being used up, and sellable stock across multiple warehouses. Scan barcodes with a USB reader or your phone camera, get email and browser push alerts before items run out, and report on stock valuation or movement over any date range.

Built on a modern frontend and a fully namespaced Joomla MVC backend, Next Inventory ships with role-based permissions, custom fields, unit conversions, warehouse transfers, and a public catalog view — all configurable without touching code.

Connect it to the rest of your business: a REST API lets an ERP, a web shop or your own admin tools read and change inventory with scoped tokens, and signed webhooks tell those systems the moment stock changes. Every request goes through the same permissions and stock rules as the screens.

🎯 Use cases

• 💻 IT asset management — track computers, monitors, and peripherals checked out to employees, with return tracking and serial-level history.
• 🏭 Warehouse & stockroom — manage consumable supplies across multiple locations with reorder alerts before you run out.
• 🔧 Equipment lending — loan tools, AV kit, or lab gear to named people and know exactly who has what.
• 🛒 Retail stock management — track sellable products with live stock levels and total-inventory valuation.
• 🧪 Laboratory & medical supplies — monitor reagents and consumables against low-stock thresholds.
• 🔗 Connected systems — let an ERP, a web shop or your own admin tool read and update stock through the REST API, and hear about every change through webhooks.
• 📎 Office supplies — keep stationery and materials in check with a full usage history.

💡 Benefits

• 📜 Replace spreadsheets with a real audit trail — every movement is logged in an uneditable record, so you always know who did what and when.
• 🚨 Never get caught short — per-item low-stock thresholds trigger dashboard warnings plus email and browser push alerts.
• 👤 Full accountability — every asset is traceable to a named recipient, down to the serial number.
• ⚡ Faster work on the floor — USB and camera barcode scanning, quick lookup, and a warehouse-optimised UI with large fonts and tap targets.
• ⚙️ Configurable without code — custom fields, roles, units of measurement, and currency/date formatting are all driven from the settings UI.
• 📱 Works everywhere — a fully responsive interface that installs as an offline-capable app.
• 🌗 Comfortable in any light — a built-in dark mode that follows your Joomla admin theme, with one button that switches both together.
• 🧩 Only the features you want — the App Manager switches whole areas off from one screen, and never deletes a thing.
• 🔌 Works with your other systems — scoped API tokens and signed webhooks that follow the same permissions and stock rules as the screens.
• 🔄 Upgrade-safe & open source — GPL licensed, delivered through Joomla's native update channel, with no deprecated APIs.

🧩 Features

📦 Inventory Management

Organise every physical asset, consumable, and product in one structured catalogue.
- Three item types — assets checked out to users, consumables used up over time, and sellables tracked for stock levels
- Hierarchical categories — a nested category tree with published/unpublished status control
- Multi-warehouse support — track stock across any number of warehouses or locations, with transfers between them
- Item images with thumbnails — upload product photos with automatic small and medium thumbnail generation
- Public frontend catalog — opt-in public pages let visitors browse available inventory with category filters

🗄️ Stock Tracking

Real-time stock quantities with every identifier warehouse workers actually need.
- SKU & barcode — store SKUs, barcodes, and serial numbers for every item with indexed lookup
- Decimal quantities — track stock to decimal precision for bulk materials, fluids, or partial units
- Units of measurement — define custom units with conversion chains (inches → feet → yards) and automatic conversion on transactions
- Low-stock thresholds — a per-item threshold triggers alerts and dashboard warnings when quantities run low
- Unit price & valuation — store unit prices for total-inventory-value reporting

🧾 Transactions & Audit Trail

Every stock movement recorded in an uneditable log — no more guessing who did what.
- Check in / check out — assign assets to recipients with structured name/email/department tracking and return them when done
- Add / remove stock — increment or decrement consumable and sellable quantities with mandatory reason fields
- Warehouse transfers — move stock between warehouses in batches with a draft/finalise workflow
- Stock adjustments — record damaged, lost, or found items with audit-trailed reasons
- Automatic quantity updates — stock levels update automatically when transactions save

🔍 Barcode Scanning

A scanner workflow built for warehouse and retail staff.
- USB barcode scanner support — works with any keyboard-wedge USB scanner, no drivers or configuration
- Camera-based scanning — scan barcodes through any device camera with the built-in web scanner
- Quick lookup search bar — type or scan a SKU, barcode, or serial to jump straight to an item
- Built for the warehouse floor — large fonts, high contrast and big tap targets throughout the scanning flow

🔔 Notifications & Alerts

Multi-channel alerts so stock never runs out without warning.
- Low-stock email alerts — HTML emails to subscribed administrators when items drop below threshold
- Browser push notifications — encrypted alerts delivered even when the admin isn't open, signed with your own keys
- In-app notification centre — a central page with filters, bulk mark-as-read, and per-user preferences
- Deduplication — low-stock alerts throttled to once per 24 hours per item per user
- Dashboard widget — a permanent widget lists every item below its threshold at a glance

📊 Reports & Analytics

Know what you own, what's moving, and what it's worth.
- Stock valuation reports — total inventory value from live quantities and unit prices
- Transaction history — filter the full audit log by date range, item, recipient, type, or warehouse
- Stock movement trends — visual charts driven by one date range with last 7, 30 and 90 day and this-month presets
- CSV export & print-ready reports — download any report as CSV, or print it dark-on-white even from dark mode

🔌 REST API & Webhooks

Let your other systems work with your inventory, safely.
- REST API with OpenAPI — items, stock movements, transfers, adjustments, warehouses, the ledger and reports over JSON, described by an OpenAPI 3.1 document your developers can load into Postman
- Scoped tokens per integration — each token acts as the user who made it, carries only the scopes you tick, and can expire on a date or after 30 days to a year
- Same rules as the screens — every call goes through the user's role, form validation and the stock rules, so an integration can never do more than a person could
- Safe retries and concurrent edits — idempotency keys stop a retried request from recording stock twice, and ETags stop two systems overwriting each other's changes
- Signed webhooks — stock changes, low stock, finalized movements and item, warehouse and recipient changes are sent to your systems, signed per endpoint and Standard Webhooks compatible
- Health checks and audit trail — a setup checklist finds hosting problems and shows the fix, rate limits protect the site, and every token and webhook change is recorded in Joomla's User Actions Log

🎛️ Customisation

Shape the system to fit your workflow, not the other way around.
- Custom fields — add dynamic fields (text, number, select, date, checkbox, colour, file, multiselect) to items, warehouses, and recipients with fieldset grouping
- Searchable custom values — flag a field as searchable and filter on its values like any built-in field
- Role-based permissions — granular per-feature roles (create, edit, edit.own, delete, view, manage transfers, and more) assignable to users or Joomla groups
- Settings-driven formatting — configure currency symbol and position, date format, decimal and thousands separators

🧩 App Manager

Turn whole areas of the component on and off, without touching your data.
- Twelve switchable areas — transfers, adjustments, reports, warehouse overview, units, custom fields, notifications, quick search, offline app, demo data, the REST API and webhooks
- Nine always-on core areas — items, categories, warehouses, the stock ledger, recipients, roles and settings can never be switched off
- Nothing is deleted — disabling hides an area and refuses its requests; switch it back on and everything is exactly as you left it
- Safe by default — an update never switches anything on for you, and a database problem can never black the product out

🌗 Interface & everyday use

Built to be lived in, not just configured.
- Light and dark mode — one button re-themes the component and the whole Joomla administrator together
- Fullscreen workspace — a distraction-free shell with its own sidebar and a breadcrumb trail on every screen
- Ctrl+K quick search — jump to any item by title, SKU or barcode from anywhere
- Date pickers with presets — calendar pickers in your own date format, with last 7, 30 and 90 day and this-month shortcuts
- Fast lists — sorting and filtering resolved across the whole list rather than the page in front of you, plus bulk publish, unpublish and delete
- Never lose work — an unsaved-changes prompt on every edit form

🧪 Evaluation & demo data

See it working before you commit to typing anything in.
- One-click sample data — a complete demo inventory with categories, warehouses, items and transaction history
- Added alongside your own — every seeded row is tracked, so removing the demo takes back exactly what it added

🔗 Resources

📚Documentation - https://nextsoftware.dev/documentation/next-inventory
📝Changelog - https://nextsoftware.dev/changelogs/next-inventory
🔌API reference - https://nextsoftware.dev/documentation/next-inventory/api
🧩Integration guides - https://nextsoftware.dev/documentation/next-inventory/integrations/admin-systems