Inventory Q&A: Ask our product team anything about Square Inventory 📊

[Tom]

Calling all sellers — especially those signed up with Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants. Our product team wants to hear your inventory questions and feedback!

On Wednesday, May 11th, we were grateful to have Mukta Dhanuka (@Inventory) and her team in our forums to address questions and feedback about Square Inventory. See the thread below for answers to your questions and keep watch for a summary of the top themes discussed.

To learn more about Square Inventory and its features, take a look at our Support Center: Basic Inventory Management. 

A few example questions:

• What are the best practices that will ensure I'm getting the most out of Square Inventory?
• What are the latest feature improvements with Square Inventory?
• If Square Inventory could take care of "_______," it would save me so much time and help me run my business more efficiently.
• I can’t seem to figure out “______” or I need help with “_________”.
• An inventory issue that keeps me up at night is “____________”.
• I wish Square for Restaurants or Square for Retail would support “________”.

Note: We can't share specific details on our product roadmaps, though this information will be helpful as we continue to make improvements.

[ms11]

@Caswellonian Thank you for sharing your feedback! Our team is working on a solution to display an available inventory count which updates upon invoice creation rather than payment. We are looking for sellers to participate in the beta release of the feature, let us know if you are interested.

[wheeler1]

I’d also like to see this functionality applied to saved carts and orders as well. When I have items in a saved cart, I want those removed from available inventory, otherwise it’s possible to oversell limited-inventory items. Thanks!

[Caswellonian]

Hi @Tom and @Inventory !

Please add the ability to scan codes when viewing inventory items using the phone app.  Currently, all you can do is type in the name of the item.

[Inventory]

Hello @Caswellonian - Thank you for reaching out. Can you please share your use-case in detail? Including screenshots will be very helpful.

[Kronke]

An inventory issue we are facing at Pure Romance is accounting for different buying discounts we get our products at and how to keep track of that within Square! Is there a way to enter the cost paid for products individually or as a lot when entering? 

[Inventory]

@Kronke - Thank you for reaching out. The ability to enter purchase discount in PO is currently not planned. Every time you receive a PO item at a certain item price that information is captured in the system and should be available in inventory history. 

If you order an item from your vendor at price $x and receive the item at price $(x - 1), the best way to capture this could be to mark the item ordered at price $x as 'Will Not Fulfill' and create another line item with the same item information in the PO at price $(x - 1) and then receive it.

[Kathy11]

We have two locations and can transfer products easily between the two locations. So it would be really helpful to take that into account with online shop inventory counts, instead of a listing saying it is not available to ship if it is sold out at our location that we ship from. 

[ms11]

@Kathy11 Thank you for the feedback. At the moment, inventory is location specific, but we’re working on ways for you to be able to customize pools of inventory across locations and fulfillment methods (shipping, pickup, etc.). Stay tuned!

[Anne_Zacharias]

We, and many other retailers, need an aging report that takes information from the POs created in Square and lets retailers know what and how many of each item have been sitting on their shelves for how long.  This is basic retail management and all the information exists in Square, it just needs to be pulled together in a report.  Please.

[Inventory]

Hi @Anne_Zacharias - Thank you for reaching out. This feature is on our radar but is not planned as of today. We will reassess our backlog prioritization based on feedback received during AMA.

[papalou]

In regards to Square for Retail unit costs, you have first-in, first-out cost which is great for tracking cost of goods and ultimately profit margin.

But very surprising you cannot subsequently change the retail price with the same first-in, first-out function. As soon as you change the retail price, it charges that amount for previous inventory. This basically nullifies the entire first-in, first-out reasoning for COGS and profit margin as the COGS and retail cost do not match item to item.

Is this being worked on and if so, when can we expect it? Thank you!

Michael

[Inventory]

Thank you @papalou - Can you please share your use-case in detail? I would love to invite you for a seller interview. Please DM me your contact information and a few time slots that may work for you in the next two weeks. 

[papalou]

Thank you for the reply. The best time to call me is any day between 8:00 - 10:00 am PST at 415-815-8877.

Looking forward to talking to you,

Michael

[papalou]

Here in California we, as retailers pay California Refund Value (CRV) for bottles and cans up front...either .05 or .10 depending on size.

This is a non-taxable item that we pass onto customers. If we sell a six pack of beer for $9.99 + tax we also collect $.30 non-tax for the CRV. Square for Retail does not have the function to have one line item while scanning at checkout that has the $9.99 taxable item and the $.30 non-taxable item together.

The only way to currently ring this up/scan correctly for payment and reporting is to scan the six pack and then scan a print out on the counter which has multiple CRV amounts...

$.05 - single under 24oz

$.10 - single over 24oz

$.20 - four pack

$.30 - six pack

$.60 - 12 pack

$.90 - 18 pack

$1.20 - 24 pack

This makes checkout and receipts much longer than it should...especially when multiple items and sizes are involved.

After discussing this with Square sales and customer service multiple times, I know I'm not the only one asking if the taxable item and non-taxable CRV could be incorporated into the same scan. This would make checkout, receipts, and reporting much more efficient. Thank you,

Michael

[Inventory]

Hello @papalou - Thank you for reaching out. It is currently not possible to conveniently capture bottle deposits during checkout. Our team will work on incrementally adding this inventory functionality in 2022. We will follow up with you to better understand your use-case as we build this. Please DM your contact information and our team will send you a meeting request.

[papalou]

Each time I would like a report or inventory and use the Export Library function, it exports my entire inventory...not just the particular item, category, vendor, or report I'd like. The solution is to filter the exported spreadsheet. With thousands of items and dozens and dozens of categories, vendors, prices, costs, etc. this makes for a lot of work and waste of time.

Can this function please be changed to just export just what we would like? Thank you,

Michael

[Inventory]

@papalou - Thank you for reaching out. This feature is on our radar but is not planned as of today. We will reassess our backlog prioritization based on feedback received during AMA.

[1stMtn]

We sell wine by the glass and bottle, and need to deduct 1/5 of a bottle from inventory when a glass is sold. We're currently using two separate items for glass and bottle sales of each wine. This requires us to remove bottles from "Bottled" inventory and add it to "BTG" inventory, which is extra work when software could do it for us (aside: Lightspeed Retail POS does this gracefully). It also results in inaccurate inventory counts since some glass items get oversold, even though we have the wine in stock, all because the staff is too busy to move inventory from the "Bottle" item to the "BTG" item.

The new "Decimal Quantity" feature seems to handle this using the Retail POS app, but it doesn't work on the Square Terminal device or on the Restaurant POS app. We need it to work seamlessly across all devices so we don't have to train our staff three different ways to do things.

[1stMtn]

Square doesn’t have a good way to track both By-the-Glass (BTG) and Bottle sales of the same product. For example: we have 12 Bottles of wine on the shelf and we sell 4 Glasses of that wine. Square should deduct 1 Bottle from inventory so that now we have 11 Bottles and 1 Glass (assuming there are 5 Glasses per Bottle).

We are currently using two products for each wine; one for bottle sales and one for BTG sales. This makes it easy for staff to add the correct product to a guest’s bill, and gives us good reporting on BTG vs Bottle sales.

However, this method also creates inaccurate inventory counts, which creates multiple other issues, such as:

1. Inaccurate COGS reporting leads to opaque financial statements.
2. Hard to see if we are losing inventory to spoilage or over-pouring.
3. Risk of overselling bottle inventory.
4. Inaccurate bottle inventory makes it difficult to time reorders.

Solution Hypothesis

There are multiple potential solutions, none of which would clearly solve all the facets of the problem.

Potential Solution	Pros	Cons
Pull BTG sales report each night and manually adjust bottle inventory each night based on BTG sales.	Nightly reporting should keep overall inventory more accurately	Potentially inaccurate bottle counts since we count glass sales and not actual inventory Could be time consuming Additional labor costs
Stop inventory tracking on BTG sales and manually adjust bottle inventory each night by counting bottles.	Nightly reporting should keep overall inventory more accurately No more low inventory alerts on BTG (which are not very helpful anyway)	Potentially very time consuming for staff each night Additional labor costs
Create a background application using the Square API to monitor BTG sales and automatically update Bottle inventory accordingly.	Most accurate Requires no staff labor Potential to sell as Square Add-On product	Expensive Will take time to develop and test Requires technical maintenance Square API might not support the calls needed to do this efficiently
Prohibit Stock Conversion during service. If we run out of BTG bottles behind the bar we tell customers we’re sold out for the night.	Ensures Stock Conversion happens when attention can be paid to accuracy	Risks upsetting or disappointing guests
Use Square’s Stock Conversion feature	Accurately deducts bottle inventory based on BTG product sales Only one sku (though with multiple variants) to manage in Square	Requires manually updating and auditing the entire Bottle and BTG inventory. Displays both BTG and Bottle items for sale online. Requires the staff use the Retail POS product instead of the Restaurant POS, which would require retraining. Would lose BTG vs Bottle category level sales reporting.

[Inventory]

@1stMtn - Thank you for reaching out. It is possible to track item variation sales or other types of inventory adjustments in different units of measure(in this case glass and bottle) through the same physical stock. This feature is currently available as part of Retail Plus package:https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5957-inventory-plus

We are planning to organize a training session on how to get started with sell-by units if you have a Retail Plus subscription. Stay tuned for the details!

[1stMtn]

When will decimal quantity sales be available in the Restaurants app?