Working with Inventory and Vendors in Products

You can get to this part of the system by clicking on Products > Products in the blue Admin Toolbar and then searching for the product you want to work with and clicking on it.

Inventory and Vendors

In the Details tab of the product, there are several areas you can configure to govern how the system will work for managing the product's inventory and for working with your Vendors in the Purchase Orders and Receiving Orders. Here are the areas:

Manage Vendors - Click the Select Vendors button to bring up the Preferred Vendors panel. You can select all Vendors from whom you might order the product. Once you've built your list, you can click on one of them to make it the Primary Vendor for the product. That Vendor will be the default the system uses whenever you work with our Ordering system, but you can always change to another Vendor for any Purchase Order or Receiving Order you do, if you need. Click Done when you are finished.

In the gray-box area for Styles and Pricing are several functions for Inventory and Vendors:

Inventory - Clicking on the Change link will open the window below and allow you to work with your inventory and cost numbers. If you are manually entering a new shipment of inventory into the system, you will put the quantity number into the Quantity field, the Cost you paid per unit, the Extra Cost is freight/shipping per unit, and the current date will already be in the Receive Date field. Previous shipments will be listed and you can see what is currently in stock (the first number, before the slash), the original quantity added (the number after the slash), the cost per unit, and the date it was entered into inventory. If you need to change any of those numbers or amounts, you can click on the Change Inventory tab and adjust as needed. The system uses FIFO (first in, first out), so the inventory that is the oldest will always sell first before starting on newer stock.

Purchasing - Click the Manage link to work with purchasing information for the Vendors you've selected for the product. Your Primary vendor will be at the top of the list. You can enter a Vendor Part Number if the vendor has a unique identifier you'll need to use in the Purchase Orders for the product. In the Packaging field, you can set how many units come in whatever packaging the vendor might use for the item. Options for unit types are Items, Inches, Feet, Yards, and Meters and the packaging types are Case, Bolt, Box, Roll, or Pack. You do not have to set anything in here if there is no set packaging done for the products by the vendor. Click Done when you have entered all the information.

Reorder Point - Your Reorder Point is where you set the amount of inventory that would be considered low enough to trigger a reorder of the product. For example, if our scuba mask gets down to 2 units left in stock, that might be a good inventory level to reorder from. If you do not plan to restock the item, leave this field completely blank (0 will still cause the item to reorder: it will trigger when the item is out of stock!).

Desired Stock Level - You can set the level of inventory that is ideal for the product, for example, you might like to have 12 items at maximum in stock for your scuba masks, so when the product gets down to 2 units, the Ordering system will prompt you to order ten more items to get to your Desired Stock Level of 12.

Default Cost - Entering a Cost value here will allow Purchase Orders to place the Cost value into the Order as an expected or approximate cost before the items are received. If there is no value entered here, the system will default to the selling Price in the orders.