It's 6 a.m. on market day. You carry eight dozen eggs and ten crates of lettuce out of the home stand's cooler, stack them in the truck, and drive to the Saturday booth downtown. Nothing on any screen knows you did that.
So by mid-morning your home stand's till still believes those eggs are on its shelf — it won't warn you they're gone, and if a customer there scans one, it'll happily sell stock that's forty minutes away. Meanwhile the booth has been selling eggs that, as far as its count is concerned, never arrived. Two tills, two wrong numbers, one truckload of produce that fell through the crack between them.
This is the quiet failure mode of running more than one selling spot. It isn't a software bug — it's the gap between what you physically moved and what you told the system you moved. Close that gap with one habit: record a move, don't guess a count. Here's how transfers work in TallyTill, where you do them, and the three that catch people out.
One product, two counts — not two products
The instinct, when you open a second stand, is to create "Eggs (Home)" and "Eggs (Market)" so each place has its own number. Don't. You end up maintaining two prices, two barcodes, and two low-stock thresholds for one thing you sell, and the moment you tweak one you forget the other.
In TallyTill a product is entered once, in one catalog, and carries a separate on-hand count for each location. "Eggs" is a single product; the home stand holds 40 and the market booth holds 8, and each till draws down only its own location's number when it rings up a sale. A sale at the booth never touches the home stand's count. (If you're still deciding how to structure this, start with the companion guide, Running Two Stands and a Market Booth — it covers the one-catalog setup this article builds on.)
That structure is exactly what makes a transfer possible. Because both counts live under one product, moving stock is a single operation that touches both at once — instead of you hand-editing two separate numbers and hoping they still add up.
What a transfer actually does
A transfer is recorded as a move: it subtracts the quantity from the location you're taking stock from and adds it to the location you're taking it to, in one action. Ten dozen eggs leave "Home," ten dozen eggs arrive at "Market," and your total on-hand across the farm hasn't changed — because nothing was sold, harvested, or thrown away. It just moved.
The important part is the fourth step. You are not editing the count on a till. You record the move once, centrally, and each selling device simply reflects its location's new number the next time it syncs. A till that's offline in a dead-signal booth keeps selling against the count it last had and reconciles when the connection comes back — so a transfer you record from the farmhouse is waiting for the booth tablet when it reconnects, not lost.
The move shows up in the ledger — with your name on it
Every change to a count is written to the stock ledger, and a move is just one kind of entry there. When a number looks wrong three weeks later, you don't guess — you read the history and see exactly what happened and who did it.
| What happened | Ledger entry | Effect on the count |
|---|---|---|
| Sold an item at a till | Sale | Decreases, at that location |
| Gave a refund | Refund | Increases, at that location |
| Picked today's harvest in | Harvest | Increases (may carry a lot + pack date) |
| Took in a wholesale delivery | Receive | Increases |
| Drove stock to another spot | Move | Decreases origin, increases destination |
| Did a physical count | Count | Sets it to the number you counted |
| Wrote off spoilage or breakage | Adjustment | Decreases, with a reason |
| Loaded the opening catalog | Import | Sets the starting number |
Because the move names both locations, the quantity, the time, and whether a person or a device did it, "where did forty tomatoes go?" stops being an argument. It's a line you can point at. (This is the same ledger covered in Why Is Your Inventory Count Wrong? Read the Ledger — transfers are one more thing it records for you.)
Where you record a transfer
You record moves in the Portal, from your phone or a laptop — not by poking at a customer-facing till. That's deliberate: the catalog and its counts are managed in one place so there's a single source of truth, and the tills out front stay locked to selling. Record the move before you drive, or the moment you've loaded — then the booth tablet already has the right number when you flip it on.
The practical rhythm: stage the load, open the Portal on your phone, record the move for each thing you're carrying, then go. It takes longer to read this sentence than to log a ten-crate run.
The three transfers that trip people up
Spoilage in transit is not a move. If two of the ten lettuces wilt in a hot truck, don't "move" eight and pretend ten arrived, and don't move ten and quietly fix it later. Record a move of ten (that's what left the farm), then an adjustment of two at the booth with a reason like "wilted in transit." The move and the write-off are different facts, and your shrink report can only find the leak if you record them as different facts. (More on that in How to Do a Stock Count and Find the Shrink the Till Can't See.)
Unsold stock at the end of the day is a move back. The six dozen eggs you bring home from the market aren't magic — they're a move from "Market" back to "Home." Skip it and your home stand will under-count all week, nagging you with low-stock alerts for eggs that are sitting right there in the cooler. Thirty seconds at close keeps Monday honest.
A box or bundle isn't a shelf you can move onto. If you sell a "Market Variety Box," its on-hand isn't a crate of boxes sitting somewhere — it's how many you could assemble from the components in stock. You don't transfer boxes between locations; you transfer the lettuce, eggs, and jam that go into them, and the box's buildable count follows wherever its ingredients are. (See Selling a Gift Box or Variety Pack for how bundles draw down their parts.)
A weekly rhythm that keeps counts honest
You don't need a warehouse process. You need three moments:
- Before you leave: record a move for everything you load, from the origin to the destination.
- At close: record a move back for whatever didn't sell.
- When a number smells wrong: open the ledger and read the moves before you touch the count.
Do that and the two-wrong-numbers problem disappears — not because you counted harder, but because the one thing you physically did (carrying crates to the truck) is the one thing the system now knows about.
Try it with your own stands
TallyTill turns a phone or tablet you already own into a checkout — scan a barcode, or snap a photo and the AI identifies the item — and keeps a per-location count for every stand, booth, or fridge you run, all from one catalog. The entry plan is free, and there's no card required to start.
Create your free account and set up your second location, or see what each plan includes on the pricing page. If you run a stand and a market booth, you'll feel the difference the first Saturday your home-stand count is still right when you get back.