Inventory
Inventory is where Kwik Nkap keeps the real stock count for the things a merchant sells. Each product you sell has a name, a price, and a quantity on hand, and every change to that quantity is recorded. Inventory items back the products you put on a Storefront and the line items you bill on an invoice, and stock is reserved and deducted automatically as sales move through Mobile Money.
Inventory is managed in the Kwik Nkap dashboard (new.app.kwiknkap.com) today. It is not yet exposed on the public developer API, which is currently limited to Mobile Money collections (POST /v1/payments, GET /v1/payments, GET /v1/payments/{paymentId}/status). Exposing inventory on the public API is planned. The concepts and behavior below describe the real product as it works in the dashboard.
What Inventory is
Inventory is your catalog of the real things you sell, with a live count of how many you have. Instead of guessing what is in stock, you keep one source of truth that every other Kwik Nkap product reads from: a Storefront grid, an invoice line item, and a Nudle menu all draw on the same inventory.
The point of tracking stock live is simple: a product cannot be oversold. While one buyer is approving a Mobile Money prompt on their phone, the quantity they are buying is already held, so a second buyer cannot purchase stock that is about to be gone.
Inventory items
An inventory item is one product in your catalog. It carries:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Name | The product's name, shown wherever it is sold. |
| Price | The unit price in whole XAF francs. |
| Quantity | The total stock on hand. |
| Reserved quantity | The portion of that stock currently held by pending sales. |
The quantity a buyer can actually purchase is quantity - reservedQuantity. That available figure, not the raw quantity, is what a Storefront shows so that stock already held by a checkout in progress is not offered twice.
When you create an invoice with line items, those items are synced into your business inventory catalog, so billing a customer for a product and tracking its stock stay in step.
Stock levels and stock movements
Inventory tracks two numbers for every item:
- Quantity: how many units you have in total.
- Reserved quantity: how many of those units are held by pending sales and cannot be sold again until they clear or expire.
Every change to stock is recorded as a stock movement, so an item carries a history of how its count got to where it is: increases when you restock, decreases when a sale is confirmed, reservations when an invoice is published, and releases when a reservation expires. The movement history lets you see why a count changed, not just what it is now.
Adjusting stock
You adjust stock from the dashboard. An adjustment changes an item's quantity and is itself recorded as a stock movement:
- Increase the quantity when you receive more stock or correct a count that was too low.
- Decrease the quantity when you write off, damage, or correct a count that was too high.
Adjustments change the on-hand quantity directly. They are separate from reservations, which are created and released automatically by invoices and Storefront checkouts. Use an adjustment to restock or fix a count, not to undo a reservation.
How Inventory connects to the rest of the platform
Inventory is the stock layer underneath several Kwik Nkap products. Two connections matter most.
Selling inventory items on a Storefront
A Storefront item can reference an inventory product, so the product you put on a hosted store is backed by real stock you track. On a published store, the available quantity a buyer sees is quantity - reservedQuantity, the same live figure inventory tracks. Because the store reads the available figure rather than the raw quantity, products already held by pending checkouts are not oversold while a buyer is approving a Mobile Money prompt.
Reserving stock on an invoice
Publishing an invoice reserves inventory stock for the items on that invoice. The reservation holds the stock so it cannot be double-sold while the customer is paying:
- Publish. Matching inventory stock is reserved for 7 days. The reserved quantity goes up, so the available quantity goes down.
- Pay. When the Mobile Money collection settles and the invoice is marked
PAID, the reservation is confirmed and the stock is deducted from the on-hand quantity. - Expire. If the invoice is never paid, the reservation expires and the held stock is released back to available.
Code
This reserve-on-publish, deduct-on-payment flow is what keeps stock honest across the platform: a Storefront checkout in progress and a published invoice both hold the stock they need, and the same item's available quantity reflects every hold in real time.
Searching items
As your catalog grows you can search your inventory by name to find a specific item quickly, whether you are pricing a new Storefront product, adding a line to an invoice, or adjusting a count. Search works over the same catalog every other product reads from.
Where this lives
Inventory is a dashboard product. Create items, adjust stock, and review stock movements at new.app.kwiknkap.com. The reservations and deductions described above are driven automatically by the products that consume inventory, so you do not have to manage holds by hand.
Next steps
- See Storefronts to put your inventory products on a hosted, no-code store.
- See Invoices to bill a customer for inventory items and reserve their stock until the invoice is paid.
- Read Payments & Collections to understand the Mobile Money collection that settles every sale and confirms a reservation.

