Your own admin system

Use this when your team works in an admin system of your own (a back-office tool, an intranet, or an application that loads the Joomla framework) and you want them to see and change Next Inventory stock from there instead of the Joomla administrator.

How the connection works

Your admin system calls the REST API with a token. Next Inventory stays the place where stock is recorded: every change your system sends goes through the same permissions, form validation and stock rules as the Next Inventory screens, and is written to the transaction log.

To show changes made elsewhere (on the Next Inventory screens, by a scanner, or by another integration), subscribe your system to webhooks rather than asking the API again every minute.

Set it up

Create a Joomla user for the integration, for example admin-system, and give it a Next Inventory role with only what your team needs to do from there: for example viewing items and checking them in and out, but not deleting them.
Sign in as that user and create a token under Configuration → REST API. Tick only the scopes it needs, such as items:read, stock:read, stock:write and lookups:read. The token can never do more than the user's role allows. See Best practices.
Store the token in your admin system's server configuration, never in browser code. Every request your system makes then carries Authorization: Bearer nxi_….
Open the Health tab of the REST API page and check every step is ticked. It tells you if your web server removes the Authorization header and shows the fix.

What your screens can call

Your team wants to	Call
Browse or search items	`GET /items` with `search`, `category_id`, `warehouse_id` or `low_stock=1`
Find an item by scanning it	`GET /lookup/barcode?barcode=…`
Check an asset out to a person	`POST /stock-movements` with `movement_type: check_out` and `recipient_id`
Receive or use up stock	`POST /stock-movements` with `add_stock` or `remove_stock`
Move stock between warehouses	`POST /transfers`
See who did what, and when	`GET /transactions`
Show stock value or trends	The `/reports/…` endpoints

Endpoint details lists every endpoint with the scope it needs, and the API Reference tab describes every field.

Send an Idempotency-Key header with each change, so a request your system retries after a network error is recorded only once. See Conventions.

If your system loads the Joomla framework

The REST API is still the recommended route, because it is documented and versioned. The same token also works on the administrator task URLs that the Next Inventory screens call (administrator/index.php?option=com_nextinventory&format=json&task=…). Use those only for something the REST API does not offer. They are not part of the OpenAPI description. See Integrating from PHP inside Joomla.

Switching it off

Switch the API Tokens app off in the App Manager to refuse every token at once, or disable a single token on the Tokens tab. Creating, changing or deleting a token is recorded in Joomla's User Actions Log.