I take that back. They need to be there. They don’t need to be so tedious.
Sure, you can set the location at the item level, and for receiving, that is a handy shortcut if you’re a smaller company that doesn’t check items into “Receiving” before distributing them to their individual warehouse and lot locations. Additionally, you couldn’t have a process in place for staging orders to “Staged” locations, or “Will Call” locations without reverting to the tedious click-search-select-select_next_item-repeat process of selecting the warehouse from which items will be pulled on every transaction. Every. Single. Transaction.
At least there is the search feature, so you can use a naming convention like 1-Staged to put the warehouses you use most at the top, right? Yes, and a hearty no. It works. Unless you have inventory, then Striven wisdom puts the warehouse that has the inventory at the top of the list. Great if you don’t use a Staged or Will Call area. A ball peen hammer to the knuckles if you use Staged and Will Call areas and have multiple locations. Probably the most egregious part of this tale of woe is if you build item kits with 10+ items to save all of the button pushing of entering every single item on a Sales Order, the search function no longer exists. You are relegated to scroll through every warehouse and bin location for every store until you finally reach the bottom of the barrel, your Staged locations with the negative inventory quantities. When you add the complexity of having multiple locations, each with their own Receiving, Staged and Will Call areas, the process is downright medieval-level torture. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to remove the shackles of this debasement.
The absolute best would be to have a company setting for the standard location per transaction. Of course, you would also need that setting to be capable of having unique properties for each transaction for each Class as discussed in this post.
A shortcut to that method would be to have an optional toggle on the each inventory related transaction that would allow the user to apply the same location to all items on the transaction. You turn a Sales Order with 20 items from the Chinese water torture equivalent of a minimum of 100 clicks into 5 at most.
Arms Of An Angel plays softly. Please. End the suffering of sales and data entry staff everywhere. With only a few hours of coding, you can be the difference in so many lives. I know this problem can look too far away from you, or too big for one person to make a difference. If all of the engineers work together for the amount of time it takes to get a single Lotsabucks coffee, we could end their pain.