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! 

[elaine_p]

I have a feature like this in beta today in Retail Plus @WaldenBros that would support selling different units that tie back to the same inventory. One example was wine that can be sold as a glass, sample, or bottle that has inventory of bottles. If you are interested, just let me know and I can add you to the beta. It should be available soon.

If you’re looking for something else, I’d love to hear more about what you’re wanting to do and an example.

[roseanne]

Can I use this to manage food items that we need to keep in stock for our grocery/cafe?

[elaine_p]

Yes, you can use stock tracking for food items @roseanne. There are limitations on what you can track today - for example, you can track the finished item like a hamburger, but there isn’t a good way to track ingredients like buns, for example. If you are trying to track something like a bun that may be used in a hamburger and a chicken sandwich, it’s not ideal. As some others have pointed out, that would mean when you are out of buns, you have to go through each food item that uses them to mark them out of stock or sold out.

[tuonlyllc]

how do i add inventory in bulk and price them on a percentage markup, and print barcodes all off of a PDF file i get from my wholesalers. i know i probably need a converter app that converts PDF to CSV. but still confused how to upload,price, and print labels in bulk. and then how do i set it up to auto-order from my wholesalers so i can stay stocked. my wholesalers have a minimum of $200.00.        Sorry, I am new at this whole thing. 

[elaine_p]

Hi @tuonlyllc! To add inventory in bulk, I would use catalog import. In your Square Dashboard, Click on Items. In the upper right, there is a button labeled Actions. Click on it and Export Library. In that file, you will see a column labeled Current Quantity {location name} and New Quantity {location name}. By adjusting the stock values in the New Quantity column, you can update your inventory. 

To update your prices on percentage markup, I would save a copy of my catalog in a different file and  use a formula in Excel or Google Sheets to calculate my price as a percentage markup on cost, then copy the price column to my master catalog file. There is a column called Default Unit Cost you can use for the formula. 

Save the file, and go back to the Actions menu to import the changes by choosing to modify the library and follow the prompts.

If you have a PDF file from a wholesaler, you’re right that it would be ideal to convert to a CSV or Excel file. I’ve had luck on occasion copying and pasting from PDFs into a Excel or Google sheet, so that is something you might try. 

Once you have your catalog ready with your pricing, you can click on the actions menu, and choose Print Labels.

Retail Plus has an automatic purchase order feature to help you stay stocked; the other option is to set up a low stock alert threshold that will email you when stock reaches that level to prompt you to re-order. I linked to a few articles that might help!

[specialtiesgame]

We would like to be able to offer pre-orders for items coming in at a later date so we know how many are sold/how many still available.  Also, still waiting on the bundle feature, as are many others on this thread.

[elaine_p]

That makes sense @specialtiesgame. To handle pre-orders today, there are a few imperfect workarounds I can think of. You could go ahead and add the expected inventory to be able to sell it online, but that is risky to maintaining accuracy in inventory because you have to remember that you received it already when it comes in, and if your count gets off then it will be harder to track back using inventory history.

If you only want to support pre-selling in Square Point of Sale, you can sell into the negative. You will see a sold out indicator, and an item tile will be grayed out and struck through, but you can still sell it. As you sell through your on hand inventory and get into pre-orders, then you can reconcile using the negative number. 

Thanks for sharing the feedback!

[MikeSL]

In the Vendor sales report is there a way for it to show current inventory along side the units sold for the date range selected? It would help when doing reorders. The Stock Feature is useless as the current stock it shows in not accurate. Having the current stock on hand in that report would making recording from the vendors a lot easier when dealing with 1000’s of SKUs.

Michael

[elaine_p]

Hi @MikeSL! We don't have this today, so my best idea is to load the Item Library and make sure the stock column is showing so you can see current inventory alongside the Vendor Sales report. Can you help us understand a little better which current stock value is inaccurate? 

[MikeSL]

In the stock forecast most of the current stock is working in that feature.

[bookandbottle]

I'm curious about inventory turnover reports. I'd like to know which of my products have been sitting on the shelf for a year versus which of my products move quickly. I don't believe that there's a current report to show this - does anyone have any work arounds? This seems like an essential piece of inventory management.

[elaine_p]

We won’t have an off the shelf report today @bookandbottle, and it makes sense why you would want one.

One report that could be used as a work around is History. In Retail Plus, you can look at history and search by item over a timeframe. I could look at something like “This Year”, specify an item or vendor, and look for items with receives but not sales.

In Square if you don’t subscribe to Retail Plus, you can click into individual items and click View stock history to get a sense of your receives and sales. The item sales report would also be helpful for this, but you’re looking for which items are not present in a specific period of time.

It sounds like what would be helpful is to highlight item variations that have slow rates of sale.

[bookandbottle]

Thanks Elaine! Yes, what I'd like to to see items that have slow rates of sale. Thanks for confiming!

[Grassroots1]

My request has to do with purchase orders, I know I can currently get each purchase has a cvs file, but would it be possible to run custom weekly or monthly purchase order report of all items ordered from my vendors?  For example we order muffins daily and a purchase order is created each day, it would be great if we could run a weekly/monthly report that would show all items ordered & not fulfilled, in one cvs/excel file, not a separate file for each day.   

I could use the bundles option desperately too!!

In addition, Doordash integration would be great, we currently have no way to track the inventory of the door dash items sold, it is a fully manual adjustment.  It would be great if square for retail would have that integration capability too!

[elaine_p]

That makes sense @Grassroots1! It sounds like you would be using this to reconcile invoicing with your vendors - is that right? 

For example - I ordered 2 dozen blueberry muffins, and you delivered 1 dozen on Monday, and then delivered the full order on Tuesday, so at the end of the month, I’ll pay for 3 dozen and not 4 dozen. 

Thank you for sharing the feedback about bundles and the need for integration with DoorDash. We do have some information about managing orders with DoorDash that may help. I will try to find out if inventory decrements using this integration.

[Helen]

Thank you to everyone who has posted a question for this Q&A! We'll start posting replies in this thread (by text) soon!

[elaine_p · Accepted solution]

Thank you again to everyone who posted a question or shared feedback during today's Live Q&A! The experiences you've shared will help us as we continue to iterate based on your feedback.

We wanted to share a short recap on three themes that came up during today's event:

• Bundles: This is something we are working towards. Our first step is in beta and will be widely available soon in Square for Retail Plus which allows for selling one thing using different units of measure.  

• Inventory for Modifiers: We hear this loud and clear as a need so that you can track things like a side option that is part of a plate meal order and do things like mark it as sold out when it’s gone.  

• Custom Adjustments:  This was the third top need that came up to allow for things like donations or accounting for sales outside of Square. 

We are inspired by the different businesses that you run and want to continue to improve Square’s products to save you time and make the business decisions you need to make around inventory. For the latest updates on Inventory, keep watch for announcements of new features in Product Updates.

Again, thank you for your participation and stay tuned for our next Q&A! 

[TNorrell]

Good Day,  

I'm not sure if I'm even in the right place to ask this question. 

1. I sell Jewelry from Paparazzi Accessories, what is the best way to mark an item as being used as advertisement because once it is worn, I cannot sale the item that is used for advertising as it is used on a Human Model. 

2. Is there a place when I do an inventory recount to make notes on that particular item just for my team to see the changes that was made. 

Thank you for any help that can be given!! 

Tracey

[Gvoneberstein]

I think this would work for my jewelry inventory issues. A pendant that sells on its own as an add-on for one price and as a necklace (with the chain) as another. but all pendants are counted from the same stock.  I'd like to be added to the Beta please.