Custom adjustment reasons let you define your own labels for stock adjustments (for example "Water damage", "Trade-show giveaway", or "Shrinkage") and map each one to a built-in category that controls how the units move and how the change is reported. You manage them at Settings → Adjustment reasons.
Every custom reason has two parts:
- : the wording your team sees in the adjustment pickers. It is cosmetic and can be renamed anytime.
- : a built-in behavior the label maps to. The category is what actually does the work: it decides which inventory pool the adjusted units go to (for example, the damaged category sends units to the damaged pool instead of sellable stock) and how the adjustment is bucketed in reports and history.
In short: the label is what you call it, the category is what it does.
Note: You choose the category once, when you create the reason. It cannot be changed afterward (see "Why the category is locked" below).
Managing adjustment reasons requires the permission. If you do not see Settings → Adjustment reasons, ask an admin to grant it.
Go to Settings → Adjustment reasons.
Click .
Enter a (for example, "Water damage").
Choose a from the dropdown.
Click .
The new reason appears in the list right away and is immediately available in the adjustment pickers.
When you create a reason, you map it to one of these built-in categories:
- Manual correction
- Damaged / lost
- Stock received
- Customer return
- Cycle count
- Sold / consumed
- Other
The category routes the adjusted units to the damaged pool (held separately from sellable stock). Every other category adjusts your available (sellable) stock. Whichever you pick, adjustments made with that reason are grouped by their category in reports and history.
A reason's past adjustments are reported by its category, so re-pointing it would silently rewrite the meaning of events that already happened. For that reason, the category is fixed once the reason is created.
To effectively change a reason's category, archive the old reason and create a new one with the category you want. You can still rename the label at any time, which does not affect history.
Go to Settings → Adjustment reasons.
Open the menu (the three dots) on the reason, then click .
Update the and click .
The category is shown here but stays disabled, since it cannot be changed.
Archiving hides a reason from the adjustment pickers without deleting it, so historical adjustments that used it still display correctly.
Open the menu (the three dots) on the reason.
Click .
Archived reasons stay in the list with an "Archived" badge. To bring one back, open its menu and click .
Tip: Reasons are never permanently deleted. Archiving is how you retire a reason you no longer use while keeping your audit trail intact.
Your custom reasons (alongside the built-in ones) show up wherever you adjust stock:
- : the per-location "Adjust" action on a product variant, where you set, add, or subtract quantity and pick a reason.
- : the Catalog → Adjustments document, where you pick one reason that applies to the whole document.