FIFO — first in, first out — is the most commonly used removal strategy in warehouse management. The oldest stock gets shipped first, which matters for perishable goods, products with shelf lives, and any operation where inventory age affects quality or compliance. Getting FIFO right in an ERP system depends on one foundational requirement: the system needs to know which units arrived when. That means tracking by lot or serial number.
Odoo has quietly reorganized where that tracking configuration lives on the product form, and the change is worth understanding if you’re setting up FIFO removal strategies or updating existing product configurations.
What Changed on the Product Form
Previously, enabling lot or serial number tracking for FIFO required two steps. First, you navigated to the Inventory tab on the product form and checked the Track Inventorycheckbox. Then, a secondary field appeared where you could choose between tracking By Unique Serial Number or By Lots.
That two-step interaction has been replaced with a single Tracking dropdown field that now lives on the General Informationtab instead of the Inventory tab. The field directly offers the tracking options — no preliminary checkbox, no tab-switching. You open the product, go to General Information, set the Tracking field, and you’re done.
Why the Tab Move Matters
Moving tracking to the General Information tab reflects how Odoo increasingly treats product traceability as a core attribute rather than an inventory-specific option. The General Information tab is where users set the product type, sales price, cost, and other fundamental properties. Tracking belongs in that category — it’s not a warehouse configuration detail, it’s a fundamental characteristic of how the product moves through the system.
For new users setting up FIFO, this removes a common stumbling block. The old workflow required knowing that tracking lived under the Inventory tab, which wasn’t intuitive when you were looking at a product form for the first time. The General Information tab is where most setup starts, and now tracking is right there alongside the other essential fields.
How FIFO Uses the Tracking Data
Once tracking is enabled, every time stock enters the warehouse, it gets tagged with lot or serial information that includes a timestamp. When a delivery order triggers outbound movement, the FIFO removal strategy tells the system to pick from the oldest available stock first — the units that have been sitting in the warehouse the longest.
Without lot or serial tracking, the system has no way to distinguish between units of the same product that arrived on different dates. Everything looks identical in the database. FIFO becomes meaningless without the metadata that tracking provides, which is why getting the tracking configuration right at the product level is the essential first step for any FIFO implementation.
Where to Set the Removal Strategy Itself
The tracking configuration on the product form is separate from the FIFO removal strategy assignment, which still lives at the product category or location level. You set FIFO on the product category by navigating to the category form and selecting First In First Out (FIFO) from the Force Removal Strategy dropdown.
Alternatively, you can set removal strategies at the location level for more granular control. The product-level tracking tells the system how to identify individual units; the category or location-level strategy tells it which order to use when picking them.
The Pattern Across Odoo’s Inventory Updates
This change follows the same direction as other recent inventory interface updates. The serial number tracking workflow overhaul modernized terminology and streamlined the configuration path, and the FEFO removal strategy documentation rewrite addressed similar usability issues around expiration date-based picking.
The common thread is consolidation: taking inventory configuration that was scattered across multiple tabs and secondary fields and pulling it into more logical, discoverable locations. For warehouse managers who set up dozens of products a week, saving two clicks per product adds up. For new implementations, having tracking visible on the main product tab means fewer support tickets about why FIFO isn’t working — because the most common cause was simply forgetting to enable tracking in the first place.