Editing Inventory when correcting item error, COGS reporting

[BrianO]

I can't tell you how much time I've wasted trying to get answers from Square's phone support. We pay all this money in fees and the official support is just terrible. 

We use the wholesale site Faire for some orders, and Square's integration with it is pretty good. You place an order on Faire, the items are created in Square. Photos, description, not all, but a lot of the item info.

When the order is delivered, your inventory is updated. 

The issue we're having is that Faire doesn't treat variations the same as Square, so an item in Small, Medium, and Large will import into Square as three separate items.  

We have to go in to manually add the variations and delete other sized items, so everything presents well on our website. 

My question is how to handle inventory here?

Do we zero the inventory before deleting the incorrectly listed item?

When we add the variations, should we mark the inventory as a recount or received? 

I want to make sure our COGS reports coming out of Square are as accurate as possible. 

Any direction or insight is appreciated. 

[JJ_]

This situation sounds a bit complicated @BrianO when deleting items and adding them again in under the correct item variation this may affect your COGS. I am no expert on Retail but I can tell you that our COGS is based on First in First Out so my suggestion so far would be to consider this when doing stock adjustments and looking at your COGS report. 

I am tagging some of our Super Sellers that may be able to understand your needs better.  @TCSlaguna @shopfybr @londontea @page158

[TCSlaguna]

Hi @BrianO 

I did not know about the Faire integration. Sounds awesome! 

Unfortunately I don't have insight on whether to mark it as recount or received. My best guess would be if Faire is marking it as received, you'd want to mark it as recount when you recreate it. 

My question for you:

Once you've set the items up as variations, the next time you receive the items from Faire, does it again create them as separate items or will it update the quantity for the variations? 

[BrianO]

Once you make the correction, you can re link the item (or variation) with the item on Faires side so moving forward, future orders have their inventories automatically updated.  

It's a great almost works really well. 

[TCSlaguna]

That's great! Trying it out now. Thanks!

[londontea]

I'm afraid that I can't offer much insight into this as I've never had to delete an item and then add the stock to another item. 

I would zero the inventory using an inventory re-count before deleting the incorrect item, then I would add the stock to the correct item as stock received. That should be the most accurate; recounting the stock on the incorrect item should make it as though it never existed so it doesn't mess up the COGS after you receive stock on the correct item. 

I've never thought about this before: is it possible for Square to have a merge feature for items? I could see one iteration of this – possibly the most simple one – is just to merge two or more items together into one item with no variations (technically there's one variation, but you know what I mean). You'd have to select which name, unit costs, prices, etc. to keep. If Item A has 2 stock and Item B has 3 stock, you merge Item B into Item A then the total stock becomes 5. A more complex version of merging could have each of the old items become a variation under a new item, with each variation keeping the stock count, unit cost, etc. of the old item. 

[BrianO]

Thank you, this is the solution I came up with as well. Zero out the incorrect item entry, then delete, then correct with a variation and mark as stock received. 

I like to idea of a merge feature in theory, but I think might be too complicated to put into practice. I think it would make a lot more sense for a) Square to fix their b2b integrations, so this thing doesn't happen outside of individual human error, and b) properly train their customer service staff on stuff like this.

[PartyManiaMD]

I use Faire regularly to try new products in the store and I manually input everything. It might save time to integrate but a lot of items I end up getting don't have barcodes or aren't "retail ready". Since I have a brick and mortar I find myself just price tagging it and we have a miscellaneous item for random stuff that isn't barcoded. 

For Faire you might want to consider manually adding the inventory, it takes a bit longer but you're then in complete control over how it's inputted. Especially if you're constantly having to create variations anyways.

[TCSlaguna]

Thanks for the advice. I think we will stick to manually adding the inventory. We are picky about product names, descriptions, and barcodes, so having full control over it is probably best. 

[PartyManiaMD]

Yea, certain companies I wish Square integrated with because I know their standards are high when it comes to the finished product. Faire is all over the place in terms of quality and how products are packaged. I ordered a rush shipment of products from a "wholesaler" only to find they were just reselling products from a company I already use and the prices were inflated. 

Faire has a lot of potential and maybe for online only it's not a big deal but a lot of the products I've ordered off of them aren't brick and mortar friendly (no UPC code or UPC code sharing lots of products).

[londontea]

We use Faire too, but I'm not a big fan of it. We found that one of our suppliers sells items on Faire and we gave it a try because we otherwise have to order items by the pallet. Unfortunately nothing comes retail ready, we have to add barcodes to everything. Breakages are common. 

We get exceptional service when dealing directly with our rep, but when we deal with them through Faire it's a nightmare. I don't blame them; Faire takes a big bite out of the sales for each vendor, and vendors can't afford to provide the same level of service with smaller margins. 

Rather than the traditional wholesale model of selling large quantities to a few customers, Faire's promise is that wholesalers can sell small quantities to many customers. I understand the business model, but I don't think it will last. I'll use it while I can because we get great deals – just like how I frequently used ride sharing back in the days when Uber and Lyft were heavily subsidizing each ride. 

[shopfybr]

I order from Faire frequently and I used to have the integration but ended up turning it off because it was created problems with inventory management and I have better control manually adding the items. Faire made some improvements and I gave it a shot again but ultimately disconnected again. Last I checked it didn't quite serve our needs. Maybe it's better now.