thread Re: Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory? in Orders, Menu Items, Catalog & Fulfilment

Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory?

dokidoki — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:52:35 GMT

I own a brick and mortar retail shop. We receive new inventory weekly and majority of it are new items, not reorders. I currently use the Retail app to receive items by using a barcode scanner and scanning them all in one by one. I have to select the category for each item, the price, and if it doesn’t auto-populate, the item name as well. Then of course the quantity, vendor and unit price. All of these are manual inputs. When you receive hundreds of new items a week, this becomes a cumbersome process. I don’t use purchase orders because they don’t work for new items, only preexisting items in your inventory. Is there another method I’m missing that would make this easier?

Re: Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory?

Candlestore — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 15:52:08 GMT

@dokidoki ;

What I have been doing is, I make a Purchase of items.

I get the Sales receipt or Paid Invoice etc. When I have Time I set all these up in Square as best I can with the information from the Invoice / Receipt. Some of my new items show the GTIN in the order or reciept to Identify the item and its Barcode. Then When I get the New Item, I can use the Inventory feature in Square for Retail, Scan the Barcode on the item and Hope it matches what I entered previously. If not i place it aside. If it does show up I type in the Amount Received and move on. Now for items that my entered barcode does not match or the Item has no Barcode, I look on my Packing slip to see which Item was not entered and see what Barcode (Gtin) I have there and search by Item name I entered and enter the Quantity. I also look up the item and Scan or Create a SKU for the Item and print what is needed. You can always create the Item in Square before receiving it.

If i take my invoice / receipt and make a PDF, sometimes excel can take those PDFs and make a Excel sheet from it and import that to Square to create the items. Sometimes the number 0 might appear as a letter O for the OCR to go from pdf to csv.

Here is my process:

Order items through suppliers website (no PO from Square)

Usually my supplier sends me a PDF invoice shown as Paid

Open Excel, tap get Data from file and choose PDF. Then choose the Saved invoice from Supplier.

Excel opens the PDF as a Table and opens Power Query.

In Power Query I have change the Name of the Columns, to something like Item, Barcode, Cost, Total etc

Then I look at the Table and add a column if needed of Category, enter a category for each item, sometimes I call it NEW. This way I can search in Square for Category New and change category to one I already have to avoid duplicate categories which are Similar in name. I also add a Column of a Selling Price to be imported.

Then I log into Square and goto Items (catalog) and Import items using the new csv file from Excel that i just created.

I match up my new headers to the fields in Square for the import.

Comeback later and Move items in Category New to correct categories inside Square.

Then I may make minor adjustments if I want before the order arrives. Depending on supplier, some items come with an SKU or GTIN and others do not. If they do not I will print out Labels and place on a Clipboard for when the order arrives. Order arrives, Get items and scan through the Inventory Receive Items. Label any items that need to be labeled and counted, then Scan to inventory. Extra Labels or Missing Labels, means Recount.

The other thing you could do from the PDF to Excel conversion is enter the Quantity Ordered to be uploaded to Inventory then. So when you receive your inventory you only need to make adjustments for damaged or missing items.

I try to prepare my inventory before receiving New items as much as possible before it is delivered. It gets too hetic, unloading and trying to count and enter stuff all at once. Try to do what you can when you have time.

Re: Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory?

Summer2024 — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:01:13 GMT

Thank you @Candlestore for providing this detailed information!

@dokidoki Please let us know if you have any questions!

I hope this information helps you!

Re: Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory?

dokidoki — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 17:24:27 GMT

Thank you so much, I'll give this a try!

Re: Help with receiving a large amount of new inventory?

ChrisFireworks — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:16:23 GMT

Coming to this late, but "hundreds of new items a week, most of them not reorders" is specific enough to be worth adding to.

Read Candlestore's reply first. The key idea there is pre-staging: build the catalog off the supplier's invoice before the boxes land, so receiving day is counting instead of data entry. That's the right shape for this workflow no matter what you use to do it, and the Power Query route costs nothing.

What stays expensive is the cleanup. Every vendor's PDF comes out of Power Query a little differently, and when most of your items are brand new, you're also filling in category and retail price for hundreds of rows by hand every week.

Disclosure: I built a tool for this, so weigh what follows accordingly. It's called Fireworks for Square, and it's the same pre-staging idea without the spreadsheet step. You send it the vendor's invoice as-is (a PDF, or a photo of a paper one), and it reads every line, checks each one against your Square catalog, and gives you a list to approve. New items are the normal case here rather than the exception: for anything it doesn't find, it offers to create the item, and you set the category and price on that screen instead of in a spreadsheet column. Nothing is written to Square until you approve it. When the shipment lands, you open the order on your phone in the stockroom, enter what actually turned up including anything short or damaged, and your Square counts update from there.

At your volume, the part I'd point at is that unit cost stays attached to the item as it receives. A few months in, you can look at what you paid against what you're selling for without going back through invoices to rebuild it.

It's $79 a month with a 14-day trial, and it works on any Square plan including the free one. Retail is what it's built for. If anyone reading this from a search is food service instead, Square's MarketMan integration covers invoice-to-inventory on that side and is the better answer for you.

Chris
fireworkseffect.com