Inventory is getting out of control!

[PrezziesSL]

I need help getting my inventory under control and make it easier to find things when ringing people up.

My questions are:

Is there a way to change the dashboard on the retail POS

With 500 items for sale, some that are seasonal, what is the best way to organize them.  We have trouble quickly finding the item in square while the person is at the register.  We normally do a search - vendor, item, or keyword.  That usually works but I have multiples of items, sometimes by the same vendor.  So search 'necklace' or 'acme widgets co' and you could still have 20 items to go through. Would it be better to group everything under the vendor? 

One thing I think will help is using variations for vendors who make a lot of one type of thing, but since they are all individually in the POS already is there a way to create a variation and add existing items into it?

I'm deathly afraid of the bulk inventory import/export as I've made big mistakes when I first set up but I suppose that using that and switching to bar codes seems to be my only way to resolve my issues.  Or using an inventory app.

Thanks!

[AdamB]

Thanks for your question, @PrezziesSL.

Are you adding SKUs to your items? You might be able to come up with a standardized SKU naming convention and search by that. I'm thinking of something along the lines of:

VENDOR-ITEM-VARIATION

You could abbreviate each of those if they are really long, but something like that would be an intuitive way to know what SKU to search by.

[DesertShop]

Hi, I deal with thousands of variations and without barcodes you might as well forget about inventory management if you have employees. Export and import of Inventory as excel is actually super easy. Tackle it now and save tons of energy and money later. 
(Sorry, replied to the wrong comment)

[Valentina]

Thanks for dropping by with your sage advice, @DesertShop - sounds like you're speaking from experience!

I wanted to make sure you saw their comment, so I'm tagging you in here @PrezziesSL 😊