Material
The material module manages your company's consumables and equipment in one place: the tenant-wide item catalog, stock per property and in your warehouses, requests with approval, issuing to persons with signature and receipt — and, if you wish, rebilling to the customer. Every figure is verifiable, because stock is not maintained as a number but computed from bookings and counts.
The module is disabled by default. You activate it once via the master switch under Settings → Material — only then do the material areas appear in the portal, the LiteLog app and the customer portal.
The building blocks at a glance
Enabling & master tables
Under Settings → "Material vocabularies" sit the tenant-wide master switch of the module and the four master tables Categories, Units, Sizes and Rejection reasons that fill the module's pickers. Everything else is described on Material (settings).
Item catalog
Under Master data → Material you maintain the single list of all items — with a kind (consumables, equipment or serialized units with serial numbers), unit, category and purchase price. For serialized items you manage the units per item with serial number, NFC chip and QR label; equipment can optionally be tracked in size variants ("Gloves (M)"). All of it on Material & equipment (master data).
Stock per property
On the property's Material tab you see the computed stock per item with a traffic-light status, define minimum and target quantities, and record bookings and counts — in the portal or on the go in the LiteLog app, there also offline and directly when completing a task. When an item falls below the minimum, the automation trigger "Material below minimum stock" fires. Described on Material (property); the module's app side is shown on Material in the app.
Warehouses (central warehouse)
Besides per-property stock, LiteLog can track warehouse stock without a property reference — from the one material store in your office up to several warehouses per branch or vehicle, which you create under Settings → Material in the "Warehouses" section. Exactly one warehouse is the main warehouse (fallback for all bookings without a warehouse reference). Goods receipt, consumption, correction, count and target quantities work like at a property and apply per warehouse; from two warehouses onward a warehouse switcher and the "Transfer" action are added. Only accounts with global visibility see the warehouses — optionally restricted per account to specific warehouses. Details are in the "Warehouses" section of Material (property).
Requests with approval
When something runs out on site, staff (LiteLog app, offline-capable), the back office (portal) or customers (customer portal) request material per property. All requests arrive in the approval inbox under Master data → Material → "Requests": approve, reject (with a standard reason or free text) or fulfill — "Fulfill" books, per position, the goods receipt at the property and the outflow in the chosen source warehouse. The flow is in the "Requests" section of Material (property).
Issuing to persons & equipment account
You issue equipment and serialized units from the property stock or a warehouse to persons — with signature on screen and the issue receipt as a PDF. What has been issued is shown on the employee's equipment account, together with return, loss report and shift handover. Recurring issues are sped up by equipment kits: templates that prefill the issue dialog. The complete workflow for keys — creating series, pairing NFC chips, scan-based handover, return alarm after shift end — is described in Key management.
Customer portal module
As a dedicated module of the customer access, your customer sees the material stock of their properties read-only (without purchase prices), requests material themselves and tracks the status. Described on Customer portal and Settings → Customers.
Evidence & rebilling
For the evidence trail there is the report "Material usage" (CSV or PDF) per property and period: inflows, outflows, costs with the purchase price at booking time, and the last count as a quality indicator; generated runs appear under Dashboard → Export & dispatch in the history. With LiteBill you rebill a customer's consumption: the action "Rebill material consumption" creates an invoice draft — see Invoices.
Good to know
:::tip Note
- The master switch is an opt-in: as long as it is off, material appears nowhere — neither in the portal nor in the LiteLog app nor in the customer portal.
- In addition, every property has its own material switch; for properties in the cleaning and facility-service industries it is already enabled on creation.
- The module manages stock and evidence, not purchasing: there are no suppliers and no purchase orders. Several warehouses with transfers, on the other hand, are fully supported — see Settings → Material. :::