Stock Movement
A stock movement describes a permanent move of physical products from or to a particular location in your warehouse. This can be products added to a location (receiving products from a supplier) or removed from a location (to fulfill a customer order).
Cases, where products are moved from one location to another are represented as two stock movements; one with negative quantity in the original location, and one with positive quantity in the new location.
Product Transfer
A Product Transfer describes a temporary move of physical products within the organization. Product transfers typically represent a future stock movement. They provide a more detailed picture of the whereabouts of a product that is about to be permanently added or removed from/to a location.
Product transfers have three stages; source, via, and destination. Each stage has an ID and a type. Examples of stages are locations and totes.
For instance, when picking a product to fulfill an order, the source stage would be the location from where the product was reserved. The via stage would be the tote into which the product would be carried to the packing station. The destination would be the order which is going to be shipped.
A product transfer has an attribute called current_stage which, as you might have guessed, designates which state the product is currently in.
Tote
A medium used to carry products. Typically as simple as a plastic box.