# What Inventory settings covers

The sixteen screens behind the gear, the five groups they sit in, and which of them are shared with the rest of your workspace.

Inventory settings hold the decisions the whole organisation works from: who you are on a document, where stock is held, what a variant can vary by, and the one setting that decides when a purchase actually becomes stock. They apply to everybody, not just to you.

## Five groups, sixteen screens

![Inventory Settings, headed with a cog and a red cross at the top right, on an amber header reading Inventory. A column on the left lists the screens under five headings: GENERAL holds Organisation, Users & Roles, Taxes, Payment Terms, Portal, Email Preferences and Preferences; MODULES holds Sales, Purchases, Items and Inventory; CUSTOMIZATION holds Templates, Tags and Notifications; AUTOMATION holds Workflow Automation with a Beta pill; ADVANCED holds Integrations. Organisation is selected, with tabs reading Profile, Warehouses, Currencies and Number Series, and its Profile tab shows Organisation Name Ironvale Industry, Industry Manufacturing, and an address in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.](https://www.sorviai.com/help/inventory/settings/settings-rail.png)

*The rail on the left is the whole surface. Each screen splits into tabs of its own, and every one of them saves from the bar at the foot.*

**General** is the organisation: who you are, who gets in, and what every document inherits.

- **Organisation**: Your profile, warehouses, currencies and document numbering.
- **Users and Roles**: Who has access to Inventory, and what each role may do.
- **Taxes**: The rates a document line can be charged at.
- **Payment Terms**: The due-date rules every document offers.
- **Portal**: The self-service site your customers and vendors sign in to.
- **Email Preferences**: The addresses Inventory sends from, and how they are authenticated.
- **Preferences**: Which modules Inventory offers, and the workspace defaults.

**Modules** is one screen per part of Inventory. **Inventory** is the big one, and the only place stock behaviour is decided.

- **Inventory**: Eight tabs: variant options, warehouses, and when a purchase becomes stock.
- **Module settings**: Sales, Purchases and Items, and the tab each document type owns.

**Customization**, **Automation** and **Advanced** are what you change once the basics are in place.

- **Templates**: The PDF layout and the covering email for every document type.
- **Tags**: The labels you file contacts, items and transactions under.
- **Notifications**: How and when Inventory tells you something happened.
- **Workflow Automation**: Rules that fire an email or a notification when a record changes.
- **Integrations**: Your shipping carrier accounts and your payment provider.

## Opening, saving and closing

The gear at the right of the Inventory header opens settings from wherever you are. It is labelled **Inventory Settings**, and it remembers the screen you came from, so the cross at the top right puts you back there.

Screens are down the left, grouped; tabs run along the top of the pane. Every screen saves the same way, from the bar at the foot: **Save** stays greyed out until something actually differs from what is stored, so a disabled button means nothing has changed yet, and **Cancel** puts the screen back.

> **Note:**
>
> **Leaving with unsaved changes prompts you**
>
> Moving to another settings screen, or closing settings, while an edit is pending raises a confirmation rather than discarding it quietly.

## Most of these are your whole workspace, not just Inventory

Your organisation profile, payment terms, portal, sender addresses, tags and notifications belong to the workspace. Another app opening the same screen sees the same values, because there is one set of them and not a copy per app.

> **Warning:**
>
> **Changing a shared setting changes it everywhere**
>
> Renaming the portal, editing a number series or retiring a payment term affects every app that uses it. The screens that are genuinely Inventory's own are **Inventory** and the module tabs beside it.

## Your rail may be shorter than this one

Two things decide what you see, and they work independently.

- **Your role**: Settings are granted per section. A role given Taxes and nothing else opens the gear and finds Taxes. Some screens, Organisation among them, stay visible to everybody and read-only, which is how anybody can check the company address without being able to change it.
- **Your enabled modules**: A tab that configures a module the organisation has switched off is removed, and a screen whose every tab has gone is removed with it. Turning packages off takes the Packages tab out of Inventory settings.

A screen that opens with every control greyed out is the first of those, and a tab that has vanished since you last used it is usually the second.