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.

[LeahfromProduct]

Great feedback! This is possible today if you’re creating a Purchase Order from iPad or iPhone and will be available on Square Register in the near future. From iPad or iPhone go to the Inventory applet > Purchase Order and tap “Create purchase order” from there, select a vendor. If you tap the search bar to add items you’ll see a toggle that says “This vendor only” if you toggle it on, only items that are associated with the vendor will be visible. Would it be helpful if we add current stock quantity to this view?

Another way to view all the products associated with a specific vendor is from Square Dashboard. Navigate to Items > Inventory Management > Vendors and tapping the vendor name. It will open a screen that has two options at the top “Vendor Information” and “Item Library” if you click “Item Library” where you can see all the items associated with that vendor. Associating an item to a vendor is done by attaching the vendor to a Purchase Order or manually adding a vendor from the item details. Would it be helpful if we showed a similar view when you were creating a purchase order? Anything that would be helpful that’s missing?

[BillyPtown]

Hi Leah, 

you have touched on a number of items of disconnect…

on retail via iPad, when you filter down to a single vendor, you can see item quantities in stock but when you add the items to the PO and are requested the order quantities, there is no quantity in stock…

on dashboard, in purchase orders, you can’t see a single vendors full list to add to a PO unless they are below the minimum order quantities to be added to an auto PO and then when created it doesn’t show quantities in stock…

and on dashboard if you go through inventory Management into a vendor and item list you can see all the items but no inventory numbers or way of adding to a po

lastly, if you go on dashboard, in items, you can filter items by vendor and see quantities but you can’t add items you want to order to a PO…

all the info and functionality exists but just not in the right use case. Retail app is probably the closest to complete, but then again we do many of our admin tasks off a computer so need it to work on dashboard as well…

it would be great to talk it through to ensure I a, not missing something…

please let me know if that would be helpful.

thanks, 

billy

[Inventory]

@BillyPtown  - Thank you for sharing your feedback. Can you please DM me your contact information and time slots that may work for you in the next two weeks for a call?

[rocastone]

When making an invoice for our clients, we attach inventory to sell. Some of those clients are on “Net Terms”. Inventory does not get removed until the invoice is paid. This most often than not gets us into trouble. We sometimes sell over each other due to the inventory count not being updated. There might be a way to add a “rule” to this but we haven’t been able to figure one out. 

[Paulyester]

@Tom @Inventory @rocastone  This has been a big problem for going on 5 years or more... no one can explain why invoices decrement inventory like it does...(there's also no situation I can think of where processing an invoice at payment is helpful to anyone, nor can anyone explain one to me).  I don't understand why it's so difficult to make it an option to decrement at invoice creation (when the item actually leaves the store)... frustrating to the point that it makes the inventory 'wrong' all the time, reducing reliability in it, and therefore making the whole system useless. 

[KenCaudill]

You are right. For anyone using Invoices, inventory reliability is gone. I never trust the numbers Square gives me.

[ms11]

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

[Volpi]

We are interested in the beta of this feature. When is the beta live?

[ms11]

@Volpi Great to hear! We are finalizing details for the Beta effort and will add your name to the list of sellers interested in participating. Our team will be in touch with more details on how to join as we get started. Thanks again for your feedback!

[Paulyester]

Was recently told that this feature request status was changed to "not planned"... but if you do a beta, we'd love to be a part of it.

[KenCaudill]

I am interested in participating in this beta release. This feature is so badly needed that many including myself have considered leaving Square for another POS.

[Honeybeard]

Hey hey @Tom and @Inventory !

Anyway to bulk edit without having to import and export inventory?
We have over a few thousand products (A lot inactive)
But it's impossible for us to go on apps like doordash because we have individually edit each product if we want to hide it on doordash or not. We are loosing a lot of money because of this missed opportunity.
It would be extremely beneficial if we could do a mass "Hide" / "Unhide".

[Inventory]

Hello @Honeybeard  - We’re currently working on building a Bulk Edit feature in  Square Dashboard which will allow you to update attributes across multiple items and variations at the same time. The initial version will not include the ability to delete or archive items, but is something we’re considering building in the future!

[helderherdwyck]

We operate a farm, and offer guinea keets in spring for ticks.  We order 100 to 150 per batch, and resell by options of different increments of number. Exmample: 6 keets, 15 keets, 20 keets, etc.  Regardless of which option someone chooses, we start with 100 total.  Is there a way to set the inventory to account for the total overall, and deduct accordingly for each option sold?  For now I have been juggling inventory by option, so if there are 12 keets left, I set everyting over 10 as sold out and set 6 keets to an inventory of 2.  Its a pain!

Thank you,

Erin

[Inventory]

@helderherdwyck Thank you for reaching out. It is currently not possible to set up an item bundle for sale and track inventory from the same item variation stock pool. Our team is actively working on incrementally adding this inventory functionality. 

However, it is possible to track item variation sales or other types of inventory adjustments in different units of measure or quantities 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!

Would you please DM me your contact information so that we can set up a follow up call?

[ivyshomemade]

Hi, if someone reserves an item but does not pay for it can it come out of inventory automatically? Right now we are manically removing it and adding it back in before the sale

[ms11]

@ivyshomemade Thank you for sharing your feedback! Our team is working on solutions to allow you to reserve inventory prior to payment. If you can share your exact use-case, our team may be able to help you set up a workaround that may work in the meantime.

[Paulyester]

Sounds like the same issue we're having with invoicing not decrementing at time of creation...  see this (Archived) thread for more:

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Read-only-archive-Square/Feature-request-for-Invoices-Inventory-i... 

However, it was brought up in this discussion thread today... just search for @Paulyester  to see it...

[FiveFelineFarm]

Inventory count needs to be reduced when an item is added to a saved ticket. Similar to Rocastone issue above—too easy to oversell if inventory is not correct. The work around I was given previously was to reduce inventory manually. That defeats the purpose of entering inventory. 

Example: I sell baked items. I can make 30 boxes of scones for a Saturday. Customer A sends a message through text to reserve 5 boxes. They want to pay at pickup because they may add other items to their order when they arrive at the store. Customer B will still see all 30 boxes available and could buy all through online check out. I am now oversold by 5. 

This will affect any business with multiple sales channels. 

[ms11]

@FiveFelineFarm Thank you for sharing your feedback. Our team is working on solutions to allow you to reserve inventory prior to payment. If you can share your exact use-case, our team may be able to help you set up a workaround that may work in the meantime.

[Paulyester]

Sounds like the same issue we're having with invoicing not decrementing at time of creation...  see this (Archived) thread for more:

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Read-only-archive-Square/Feature-request-for-Invoices-Inventory-i... 

However, it was brought up in this discussion thread today... just search for @Paulyester  to see it...