Items dropping out randomly?

[swisspantry]

We are using Square Retail along with a barcode scanner. We are having issues with an item randomly showing up as “item not found” when it has worked perfectly for months. The only solution we have found is to go into the back office and completely delete the item and input it all over. It is annoying as heck because this happens quite frequently. Is there something that is happening on our end or is this a Square issue? How do we fix it?

[Candlestore]

@swisspantry ;

I am not sure why this is happening to you, but I have had a similar issue in the past.  I would scan an item, would get the pop up Barcode 86657595 not found for example.  When I looked at the item in the back office I would notice a Digit in the front or back of the barcode was missing.  Because the item I was scanning had the barcode around a small round area.  Another big issue is some barcodes lead with a 0 (zero) which in excel and other spreadsheets gets dropped before importing unless you format that column as Text I believe.   So Barcode of 098765 in excel to import to square shows as 98765 which Square will say Item not found.  I had a big mess when my leading 0 dropped on an import.   I hope one of these two issues solves your problem.

[swisspantry]

Thank you for replying. I will double check the numbers and I didn’t even think about the issue with excel and leading zeroes. It happens randomly for some reason

[TwinkleToes]

@swisspantry ,

You might also want to look at the documentation for your scanner. There are settings that you can make which will either direct the scanner to retain or remove leading zeros from the scanned barcode. Typically these are done by actually scanning "set up" bar codes from the device's manual.