Square Inventory & Item Management: Ask our Product Manager Anything!

[Helen]

Hello!

On Thursday, September 9th @elaine_p from our Inventory team joined us in the Seller Community for another Q&A all about Inventory and Item Management.

This event has now ended - thank you for everyone who asked a question!

We've released a lot of features over the last year, and we asked you to share what's working well and where are the areas where we can improve. We can't share out specific details on our roadmap, though we make sure any feature requests that came through during the event are considered for further versions of our products. Read through the replies below to learn more! 

[Mealco]

Agreed this would be very helpful for Restaurant Operators. Additionally having a standard workflow for managing Product Availability is necessary. Menu Items can be Sold Out but Modifiers are not structured as similar objects in your system so cannot be handled in the same manner. In our restaurant Modifiers are often representative of Menu Items themselves and need to be treated as such. 

[grovetealounge]

Yesss this x10000! Being able to track inventory of ingredients and link them to menu items would be invaluable. We already inventory ingredients when they get delivered by our suppliers each week, so it wouldn't be any extra work to just input those new stock values into each ingredient

[elaine_p]

Thanks @sotexbbqco, @Mealco, and @grovetealounge for the suggestions. There are plans to provide an ability to link ingredients to items in the future. Love the example of the pork belly @sotexbbqco

[marketonmain]

When will we ever have the ability to bundle items? We sell a lot of gift baskets and having to manually remove every item from inventory every time is such a pain. 

[wheeler1]

+ 1 for this.

I have a wine shop and we often bundle items together, like 6 or 12 pack deals or wine club. I am still using an old POS system for my wine club that has been able to do bundles for years and have to manually reconcile the inventory sold in that system with Square. Lack of bundles is keeping me from moving all my sales to Square.

[grovetealounge]

Agreed! Tack on another vote from me for this feature. We are a cafe that makes our own cookie dough bites in house. We have lots of flavors but offer people the ability to bundle 12 together and they get the 13th for free.  My issue is that many of our bites cost different amounts, so the price of the 12-pack varies depending on the product mix. It'd be super helpful to just bundle items together rather than having to ring up every single bite separately

[elaine_p]

Thanks for the specific example @grovetealounge!

[elaine_p]

Thanks @wheeler1. I’m curious if your 6 or 12 pack deals are “fixed” bundles, or if it’s up to the buyer to mix and match? We’ll start with the fixed concept.

When it comes to bundle deals, like a discount for buying a certain amount, Square does support quantity-based discounts that might be helpful for a mix and match. After setting up the discount for 6 bottles, you would ring up each one, and then when you hit the quantity threshold, the discount will apply. This article has more information about how to do that under “Create Automatic Discounts”

[bookandbottle]

Yes! This would be a HUGE help for the holidays!

[elaine_p]

Hi @marketonmain and @bookandbottle, while I can’t comment on when specifically, I can say that we plan to provide this ability. Our solution that will enable the ability to link items together for ingredient tracking would also serve things like gift baskets to decrement all of the products included in the bundle.

[QuiltersDream]

I noticed last week some pink circles around my item numbers started showing up on my items page- they were on the stock number on my desk top only - not my iPad.  I am just wondering what they are and why there are there?  I called a few days ago and was given an explanation of I needed to go into my locations on that item and make sure the box for multiple locations was checked.  I did that and no difference.  I also clicked on different ones and some already had the boxes in locations checked? 

Do I need to do something to get those off of there? 

Thanks

[elaine_p]

Hi @QuiltersDream! Those red circles around your stock value indicate that something is sold out. Since you are still seeing a stock value, that means that you have stock of a variation or at one of several locations. 

To get them to go away, you can add stock. If you don’t wish to track stock any more, then you can turn off stock tracking by clicking on the item, and then clicking on the stock value. You can turn off “Tracking,” and also make sure that after you do you turn off “Sold Out.”  

In this screenshot, it’s available at my Restaurant location, tracking is off, and it is not marked as sold out. I got here by clicking an item, then clicking the stock count. 

[BeFaith]

Hello,

All of my items are currently showing as unavailable for purchase in my online shop. I do not recall setting this option in my store. I've tried just about everything to get them to show online for purchase. How should I go about troubleshooting this request? Thanks!

[elaine_p]

Hi @BeFaith, my thought would be to check and see if inventory tracking is on. When you don’t have inventory, then items show as out of stock online and are not purchasable. 

The other idea would be to check that your items are marked visible in your online store. From my Square Dashboard > Items > I clicked on an item and then scrolled down to the Square Online Settings section and clicked Go to Square Online. 

[The_Good_Life]

It would be great to only see items in stock on dashboard.  We have hundreds of items and sorting through all the out of stock selections to find the in stock items is time consuming 

[elaine_p]

Makes sense @The_Good_Life, thank you for the suggestion. Today you can filter to see Sold Out or Low stock inventory, but not just in stock.

[wheeler1]

I own a wine shop and these are things I'd love to see in Square for Retail: 

1. Please, please add the ability to sell items in packages or bundles consisting of multiple inventory items. 

2. I'd love a way to "reserve" items from inventory so that I don't oversell them either in store or via Square Online.

Example: We often receive orders from wine club members who want to add onto their monthly club, but I don't want to ring the sale until we process a single transaction for them later in the month. Reserving the items would allow me to know how many are available to sell and how many are spoken for. Another form of this would be the ability for items in saved carts to be reserved from inventory.

3. Someone else mentioned previously, and I agree, that the standard fields in stock adjustment aren't useful and should be customizable. Because of limitations in #1 above, I still have to use an old POS system for my monthly wine club sales and manually reconcile those sales with my Square inventory. The only stock adjustment description I use now is "Inventory re-count" but I'd like to either a) have a custom field or b) have a field that says something like "manual sale" or "sold via external system."

4. I'd also like to see an ability to setup and sell fractional units of an item that, once a certain quantity has been sold, then a whole unit would be removed from inventory. Case in point is selling wine tastings or wine by the glass. After a certain number of tastings or glasses sold, then a bottle would be removed from inventory. 

5. I don't know if this is directly related to inventory & item management, but I'd like the ability to set a commission rate for specific item categories, rather than all items. Right now it's all or nothing, and I have to manually run reports and calculate commission for my staff on certain item categories.

Thanks!

[bookandbottle]

Following this for the wine part of my business! Great questions!

[elaine_p]

Thank you for the additional feedback, suggestions, and examples @wheeler1! (And thank you for following @bookandbottle!)

I can absolutely see where you are coming from on points 1 and 2.

On point number 3 - do I understand correctly that the monthly wine club sales sold in another POS system should decrease inventory count, but should not increase revenue because this is accounted for in an external system? 

For number 4, we have a feature in beta right now that allows for this type of use case using Retail Plus. You can set up a conversion for glasses or samples per bottle, and each one will decrement the bottle inventory. We will have this available soon, and I can add you to the beta test group now if you’d like!

[wheeler1]

Hi @elaine_p , yes, for #3 selecting that option would decrease inventory count, but would not increase revenue – you're correct that revenue would be accounted for in the other system.

In my case, Square for Retail is ideally my source of truth for inventory as we create purchase orders and receive inventory into Square. However, if I sell merchandise via another POS system (or another channel like ebay) I'd like to be able to do a manual adjustment to decrease my Square item inventory by the  quantity of items sold via the external system.

That's good news on #4, sounds very interesting, thanks!

[Gvoneberstein]

I'm trying to keep an accurate inventory of the jewelry I make and sell in my store. Some of my items are more complicated than the rest. I make stamped initials and zodiac symbols. I sell them on a necklace at one price and sell them as an additional pendant for another price. So a customer can buy the initial necklace and add an add-on zodiac charm. As I make the charms, I add them to a charm tray in my store. I also have them for sale as necklaces. I use the tray display as my backstock and refresh my necklaces from the tray. My question is, how do I keep an accurate stock of my pendants. if the same pendants are sold as both necklaces and pendants?  they have different buttons in Square. One is an "add-on Charm" button and one is the "zodiac necklace" button.