Physical Inventory for Items I Do Not Have?

[Stagecoach]

I switched my POS system to Square earlier this year, and I am currently doing my first cycle count by scanning barcodes with my phone. However, I’m facing a problem: when I scan items from a particular vendor to verify inventory levels, the system only shows the items that I scanned, not those that are missing. For example, if my inventory shows that I should have one toaster, but it was stolen, I can’t scan it, and it doesn’t appear as missing in the count. This means my inventory will continue to show that I have this toaster until I somehow realize it’s missing. With over 10,000 SKUs, it’s not feasible to manually identify which items are unaccounted for.

With my previous POS system, I could scan items from a specific vendor, import them, and then filter by that vendor to see all items and their expected quantities, even if the count was 0 or -1. This allowed me to identify missing items by seeing which items hadn’t been scanned.

Is there a workaround or solution in Square for Retail that would allow me to see items that should be there but weren’t scanned? Not being able to identify missing items seems like a significant oversight.

[Candlestore · Accepted solution]

@Stagecoach ;

After using your phone to enter quantities etc, you can go on your Square Dashboard on a computer > Items  Then any item with a 0 or negative number will be shown in red under the Stock Column.

Now you can also Export this and then use a spreadsheet to sort the Quantity column from Lowest to Higest to get all your Sold out items together.  Their is also a Filter on your Desktop in the Items page to filter items by Vendor without exporting your catalog.  On my computer I went to my Square Dashboard then to Items and filtered by a vendor and here were my results :

The Red circle is the Filter Icon where you can choose Vendors, and do not need to scan an item at all.

[nonnaandomas]

I have the same issue, but the accepted answer doesn't address it.  If an item has been stolen, then the stock will show that there is one, but there will be none to count on the floor.  I can't see any way to catch this with the current system.  We need a way to flag items that have not been counted (or not counted within a recent time period), so that we can catch items that are out of stock in reality but showing stock available in Square.  This would be the opposite of looking for items listed as out of stock; you'd have to recheck every item with stock greater than zero, which would be almost all of the store! 

[Stagecoach]

You are correct, the above answer does nothing to solve or help this issue. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a way to solve this inside Square, and, as you can see, never received any support from them. This is a horrible oversight by Square that has left me frustrated. To me, Square POS seems to work better for smaller stores that have limited SKU's. It is just missing some important functionality for stores of a certain size.

That being said, I will share a tedious workaround that I use for this issue. I have a ChatGPT paid subscription that enables me to do this.

1. Inventory available items using Square's phone app

2. Upload this physical inventory into Square normally

3. Export the list of inventoried items into Excel

4. Export the list of the total inventory. Because I inventory each vendor separately, here I would export the full expected inventory list from the vendor that I inventoried into Excel. So at this point (from steps 3 and 4) I have one Excel file showing the items that I successfully inventoried from the vendor and another Excel file showing all of the items that I am supposed to have from that vendor.

5. Upload both of these files into ChatpGPT and have it compare the two files for differences. Here is the prompt that I used (obviously you would use your own file names): "I have uploaded two Excel files. ABC Inventory file shows my entire inventory for this vendor. ABC Count file shows the items that I was able to physically count. I want to know which items from ABC Inventory I was not able to physically count. Can you match up all of the items between these two files and then create a list of which items from ABC Inventory were not listed in the ABC Count file? When creating this list please leave all available information for each item from the ABC Inventory file (Item Name, Variation Name, GTIN, SKU, etc.)"

6. You can export this list of missing items into a new Excel sheet. You now have a list of items that were not physically counted. I would next go through this list and see what is missing, correct any mistakes I made while physically inventorying, and change the inventory in Square.

I hope this process can help you. As with any AI process you have to be sure things turn out correctly and it may require some tinkering with the prompt. There may be an easier way but this is how I handle this. I will reiterate how ridiculous it is that Square does not have a way to handle this obvious problem.

[Candlestore]

@nonnaandomas ;

You could do Cycle counts which has you count some inventory then on another day, week, or month count another area, vendor etc so you do not have to count your entire store at once.  Here is more about Cycle counts with Square : 

8248-conduct-cycle-counts-with-square-for-retail 

This will have you count items that you have in your Square system with more than one Item.  So if it was Stolen and you go to count the Item and it was 0 that is where the Best answer comes into play.  How to change count from a 1 to a 0 because Item was stolen.  I usually use my Accounting software which has Inventory management in it also and a cycle counting feature.  I use Square as a check and Balance with my Accounting software and as a general idea of my counts.   I figure no matter which Square system you use, you still need an Accounting system to use for operating expenses, like Rent and Utilities etc.  So I made sure I have one that has a good Inventory system also.