Inventory tracking for free items?

[WashoeSnackbar]

I run a baseball concession stand where we frequently give items away (such as free candy for returning a foul ball or a free snack for volunteering). How can I record these transactions without money exchanging hands? I want to make sure my inventory counts stay accurate. Thanks!

[GlassJudy]

I would set up a dollar discount, and leave the price blank so you can fill it in at the time of the sale.  So your transaction would be something like:

Item: Hot Dog   $2.00 (or whatever)

Discount    $2.00

Item #2, etc, etc.

The only problem would be if you had to give out more than one discount per ticket because you can only apply one discount per transaction.  In that case, you'd need to keep track of the dollar value of all the discounts and enter them as one at the end of the transaction.  However, doing this, you wouldn't have easy tracking of which items got discounted.  Note that as discounts are taken before sales tax (if applicable) is applied, each item's cost and discount would even out with no tax charged.

Another way to go, if you didn't need to keep your inventory accurate, would be to set up variations.  But you wouldn't want to do that as the reason you're setting this up is to keep your inventory up to date and accurate.

Good luck.

[FiveDollarBling]

I have the same question!! I give away items as well and I have not found any way to track Free Items (Giveaways, promotions, etc) when that is the only transaction taking place at the time. When I have tried to enter the item(s) as a sale and then proceed to discount the invoice/transaction for the sale amount in order to zero out the invoice/item while keeping a record of who, what item(s), when and why I gave away the item(s) the Square system states "Invoice total must be between $1.00 and $50,000.00". This is so frustrating and is causeing me to spend all this extra time to keep up with a written log in order to track all of this information. I have found that I can easily do these types of transactions while invoicing and/or charging the customers for other items above and beyond the Free Item(s), as long as there is a dollar amount. And it does what I need it to, by deducting the item(s) from the Inventory count and I have a record of who, what, when and why! And can easily see what discount, How many discounts and the dollar amount discounted within a certain time frame by running the discount report. This is super helpful (when I have been able to track) and would be a HUGE improvement to the square platform if we were able to do these transactions alone without the need to have a minium dollar amount tied to our transactions/invoices as I have attempted to find a way to make this more streamlined and user friendly. **What would be AMAZING is If we as merchants could zero out an invoice/transaction and there could be a pop-up window that verifies our intent to create an invoice with no dollar amount being charged to the customer and if we click YES/AGREE, verifing that we are aware we are creating an invoice/transaction of $0 then the square system would continue with creating the invoice/transaction like it does when a dollar amount is being charged!!** This would be an incredible feature to have available and I would really like for this to be a consideration.

[GlassJudy]

You can ring up sales of less than $1, but you can't process them as charges.  Ring them up as cash or check and it will work fine.  My store sells several items for under a dollar and we sometimes have a total of under $1 for the total sale.  I just checked it out on my system, and it let me enter a sale for zero dollars, but the only payment type option was for cash.

[FiveDollarBling]

Thank you @GlassJudy. I was able to do as you stated on my App. I Cannot do this from my computer or laptop, but that's ok. I am so excited to have learned how to record this information. And yes it does remove the items from my current inventory count and shows up on my reports as well. Again Thank you! 

[SassEverlasting]

Yes we REALLY need an option to have a zero dollar invoice processed and for it to track inventory!!!

[GlassJudy]

I don't use Square's invoice system, so I didn't realize that you couldn't generate an invoice for $0.  My responses above were only intended for those cases where a transaction (sale) was being entered at the POS.  I am constantly amazed at those cases, like this one, where Square won't allow the user to do something so obviously needed (my pet peeve is not being able to enter partial quantities.)

[Officejak]

This reply was created from merging an existing thread: I need to create an item that i can track how many were rang up on a specific day.

I need to track how many of this item were rang up. There will be no cost to this item. I'm just trying to track how many customers came in from this one source.

[Helen]

@Officejak I'm moving your post to this thread where sellers are already discussing ways to process sales for free items.

You can also use Item Sales report from your online Square Dashboard to look at specific item sales over a period of time.