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Why the same product needs more than one record

Two units of the same product bought six months apart are not interchangeable in your records, even though they are on the same shelf. A lot or batch number is what keeps them apart.

What tracking by lot gives you

• Cost history — each purchase keeps the price you actually paid, so a cheaper restock never revalues older stock
• Expiry — dates belong to a batch, not a product, so "expiring within 60 days" can mean something
• Traceability — if one batch turns out to be bad, you can answer which units went where instead of contacting everyone
• Supplier accountability — a failure attaches to the supplier and the order it came from

The minimum worth recording

Lot number, supplier, order date, arrival date, quantity, unit price, the overhead share, and expiry. Everything useful is derived from those: landed cost, lead time, shelf life, what remains of that batch.

Deleting is the dangerous part

A lot is usually the parent of purchase records, hand-overs and lab documents. Deleting the parent commonly takes the children silently — which is how a business loses the record of stock a reseller is holding without ever seeing an error. Before you delete anything in any system, the question worth asking is what else points at this.