FEATURE REQUEST: Disable sales of out of stock items

[savagewood]

I've seen numerous threads on this with the same answer - "there's no way to mark an item out of stock on the POS if inventory hits 0, and this in an intended behavior".

Ok, I understand. But - especially with the new normal for restaurants and breweries that have shifted to a combination of online and counter sales, it creates an inventory nightmare to have the website show "sold out" correctly, but the POS is still allowed to sell items, not realizing that stock has been sold and accounted for.

Please make this an option ASAP to at least let us choose whether to allow sale of out of stock items or not. Your "concern" about sellers missing sales because we didn't update inventory, pales in comparison to the reality of a person placing an online order, then coming in to pick it up, to not have it available because the counter continued to sell an item that was in fact sold out.

Numerous people on the forum have made this request, and yet you have done nothing to address an actual client need.

Please respond.

[AshleyK]

Hi @savagewood thanks for reaching out about this. This feature is available on our Square for Restaurants subscription where you have the option to mark an item as "unavailable" as soon as it's inventory hits 0. This can be automatic or manual, whichever you choose.

You can set up auto-86ing for menu items by tracking the item quantity from the Restaurants app — so your employees will only be able to add available items to a check. To get started, just enter the item quantity from the Restaurants app:

1. Tap and hold a menu item.
2. Toggle on Track Remaining Items and enter the item count.
3. If the item is a part of your fixed menu, you can enable Make Available at End of Day.
4. Tap Save.

During the course of a shift, each time an employee places an order to the kitchen or bar, the item quantity will reduce. When the item count reaches zero, employees won’t be able to add it to a check.

Keep in mind: Setting item quantity for auto-86ing is different from setting your inventory quantity in your online Square Dashboard. Your Online Store item availability is determined by your inventory quantity online. 86ing an item from the Restaurants app will not prevent customers from ordering online.

[savagewood]

So what you're saying is that this doesn't solve the problem of having inventory online and in-store match, and go down at the same time?

[eclecticsgaller]

This is HUGE for us - using Square inventory in a handmade art boutique where EVERY ITEM is a one-off. We are hesitating to switch over to barcode scanner and total inventory management because once an item is sold, it is gone BUT the system still allows it to be sold. This would change our life completely if this was something we could turn on or off.  

Please work on adding this ASAP or give us a work around. We are an artists co-op so don't have a back room staff who just inputs and clears up inventory items. We need it to actually do something for us.

[EricLivesay]

Don't hold your breath. Square doesn't really care about customer opinion. I've seen requests for this dating back several years and still hasn't been fixed. 

[Rp3]

I would also like to have this feature.

I use Square for Restaurants and the track remaining items on the app is better than nothing, but not much better. It's really only useful for when all of our business was done in house and also, even then, it would be nice to control all the counts in one place among other issues.

We run into trouble with the item being available online but was actually sold out in house, so unavailable when the customer comes to pick up.

Our work around is to count part of our actual stock online and the other part in the POS app, which is silly and problematic on its own since there are no permissions for adjusting remaining items in the app, so mistakes, or theft can cause problems, and running out of stock when you actually do have the product is a way to leave sales on the table (sales that square would also benefit from!)

Hope this can be done.

[elGaucho]

So this post was from 2020 ... 2023 now and this is not even relevant information. Is this feature still not available? It's crazy that my servers can order an item we are out of even if I'm taking the time to track each item!!!!!

[Kassi_]

Hey there, @elGaucho - 

Do you have the low stock alerts set up on your items? This would help keep your servers notified on the stock they are currently working with. 

At the moment, this would still be a Feature Request that can be added to our Ideate Board. I would recommend heading over there to drop a post or add a like to the requests you'd like to see. 

Thank you! 

[3seaqueens]

Having the ability to turn off item availability would be amazing. I have customers who shop on my square site, customers that I ring up in the checkout, and I invoice for items. I sometimes oversell items that I can't restock because it allows me to sell items in the check out and in Invoices that are Sold Out. Or it allows me to sell and/or invoice for more items than I have in stock. This makes for very disappointed customers and a frustrated business owner. Please help with a toggle on/off for the ability to shut off sales for specific items or all items in our inventory.

[Joe]

Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Seller Community, @3seaqueens - we really appreciate you adding your voice in support of this Feature. We agree, this would be a huge win for a lot of Sellers!

As soon as we have more info to share on this front, we will reach back out to everyone here and let you know! In the meantime, you can read about the process of Feature Requests here. 

[Carlikolber]

Please add this feature. We work in a restaurant and selling out of stock items is a nightmare for us as well.  

[pulseprop]

im having an issue of item counts not subtracting correctly and the item reappears as in stock after it is sold out. The auto 86ing not working on all items causing out of stock items to be sold. 

[RobynR]

Hey @pulseprop,

Welcome to the Community; seeing a new face is always nice.

It's hard to pinpoint what may be happening without walking through your account with you in real-time. If you're still experiencing this issue, I recommend contacting our Support team directly. They can be reached here at 1-855-700-6000 Monday- Friday 6 am- 6 pm PST or by heading here squ.re/contactsqsupport.

Let me know if I can assist you with anything else.