Bulk to individual inventory items

[CRoom]

hello, I am a Cigar Retailer changing POS systems. 

Cigars are normally purchased in bulk. 1 box containing 20 individual cigars.

So for purchasing and receiving I'll order 5 boxes.

The boxes are then opened, and customers typically will buy 1 or 2 cigars. Though they can buy an entire box if desired.

The box and the cigar have their own unique SKU and barcode.

What is the best way to set up the inventory so SQUARE recognizes a box is X qty of cigars?

I attempted to use the stock conversion article, but the steps are not complete, and I'm not dealing in pounds or ounces. Just item containing items.  Thank you,

[Candlestore]

@CRoom ;

As I see this is your first post welcome to the forum.

The way you were trying with the Conversion Article is the best way to do what you want to do.  This will keep track of how many Cigars total you have and also if you have 100 cigars will also show you have 5 boxes of 20 to sell.   The issue I have had is with 2 things.  If the cigar has Barcode 123456 and you scan that, Square automatically puts 1 Cigar in the Cart, You scan it again and now it is 2 Cigars in the cart.   But when you scan a Box of 20 SKU 56789, you get a Pop Up asking How many and defaults to 0.  Which makes no sense to me.  The other issue is in the Reports of how many are in stock.... If you had 97 cigars total (4 Boxes and 17 singles); thanks to Rounding you would show 97 Cigars and 5 boxes available for sale.  Once you have 89 for sale then it would drop to 4 Boxes available to sell. 

Not sure which article you were referring to as not being complete, but here are two I found and if you have questions I may be able to help since I have this setup for my Candles ( Case of 144, Packs of 12, or Singles)  3 Barcodes

7237-stock-conversion-sell-by 

New-Retail-Feature-Sell-by-Units-and-Stock-Conversion/m-p/670982/highlight/true  

[TwinkleToes]

Hi @CRoom , welcome to the Seller Community!

Sounds like the missing link for you is creating a new Unit of Measure called "Box". From the main menu on the dashboard, select Items and there will be a sub-menu for Units. From there you will be able click on the Add a Unit button to create a new Unit of Measure.

When setting up your item, you'll now be able to make sense of the stock conversion article and set up the conversion that 1 Box = 20 individual items. The cost should be set for the Box as that's how you will be ordering from your vendor. The individual cigar cost will be calculated based on the Unit conversion factor. You'll be able to set a price at both the box and individual cigar level, which would allow you to offer a discount when buying the box.

[CRoom]

thank you. Yes i now can make individual cigar and/or box sales and inventory adjusts correctly for purchases and returns.

I have now encountered another problem. 

When I go to create a purchase order. Within the PO screen, Square only recognizes the sku for the individual cigar, not the box of cigars. Buy I do not buy by the cigar, but by the box.

All feedback welcomed.

[CRoom]

Talking with Square, the PO system only recognizes the primary item, but not the variations. The imported inventory in my old POS was all items, as PO's were done by email and quantities were manually adjusted in the old POS system.

With y'alls help, I can create the box variations and sell boxes or individual cigars and inventory tracks correctly. But with the box being the secondary item, the PO side doesn't recognize the box. of the three ways to create a variation, the large create variation button above the modifiers section will let you change what is the primary and secondary item, but unit conversion is not available so the 2 versions do not talk to each other.

There might be a way to manually adjust what variation is primary by exporting the inventory into excel and manually redefining what's the primary and secondary variant then import the list back into square. My last option is starting from scratch and entering the 1200 box sku's then the corresponding cigar sku as the secondary variant.

[TwinkleToes]

@CRoom 

Through a lot of trial and effort, I realized that you have to pick your poison when it comes to using the unit of measure functionality. As you found out, if you pick the box as the secondary, you cannot create a purchase order using the box SKU. On the other hand, if you pick the box as the primary, then using the Manage Stock functionality to adjust inventory for something like damaged goods, forces you to enter the transaction using the box (primary) UOM as well. In your case, to remove a single cigar from inventory, you'd need to adjust using 0.05 box (1/20).

Notes:

• If you take this path, edit your box Unit and make sure to set the Precision to two decimal places.
• Your item library will display Stock On Hand and Available to Sell in the box UOM with the decimal precision you set.
• Fortunately, either UOM as primary is handled correctly on the sales side of the house

It's not often that I need to perform manual adjustments to inventory, so I chose to use the bulk UOM as the primary to get the benefit of ordering/receiving with purchase orders.

There have been previous threads along these lines so I am going to make sure there's a feature request in the Ideate section with enough details for expanding the Unit of Measure functionality. Fully implemented UOM functionality should allow us to choose which UOM we are using on any given transaction. This would allow us to use the bulk UOM on purchase orders and the single unit when adjusting inventory. This is nothing more than math, which I heard through the grapevine computers were fairly good at.

Good luck and SORRY I didn't mention this in my original post, as it might have saved you going through the same pain that I did when converting everything over to Square.

[ndixon]

@CRoom I've found that it works a whole lot better if you do it by the unit instead of by the case. You'll be able to see how many cigars you have in inventory better this way. You'll see the total number of individual cigars in the items section of the dashboard instead of a decimal fraction of a case.

The big downside to this that I've come to terms with is that your purchase orders might not match your invoices exactly because you will have to set the cost per cigar instead of a whole box. The cost only allows two decimal places so if you have something that works out to $3.33333 repeating, it'll have to be $3.33. If you have a case that costs $65.43, individual cigars will cost $3.2715. When you go to enter it in a purchase order you'll have to put in 20 at $3.27 which would equal $65.40 instead of $65.43. Sometimes my purchase orders are off by close to a dollar. It adds up when you get into bigger quantities.

[CRoom]

thank you all. agree, will manage inventory with the 1 cigar as primary. will generate PO's in a sepearte system, but make a square po of the individual sticks for recieving purposes.. it's an extra step, but presents the fewest amount of headaches