Inventory Q&A: Ask our product team anything about Square Inventory 📊

[Tom]

Calling all sellers — especially those signed up with Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants. Our product team wants to hear your inventory questions and feedback!

On Wednesday, May 11th, we were grateful to have Mukta Dhanuka (@Inventory) and her team in our forums to address questions and feedback about Square Inventory. See the thread below for answers to your questions and keep watch for a summary of the top themes discussed.

To learn more about Square Inventory and its features, take a look at our Support Center: Basic Inventory Management. 

A few example questions:

• What are the best practices that will ensure I'm getting the most out of Square Inventory?
• What are the latest feature improvements with Square Inventory?
• If Square Inventory could take care of "_______," it would save me so much time and help me run my business more efficiently.
• I can’t seem to figure out “______” or I need help with “_________”.
• An inventory issue that keeps me up at night is “____________”.
• I wish Square for Restaurants or Square for Retail would support “________”.

Note: We can't share specific details on our product roadmaps, though this information will be helpful as we continue to make improvements.

[Tom]

👋 Hello Everyone and welcome to today's Square Inventory Q&A!

Our Inventory team is logged in and replying to your questions in writing within this post. Keep watch for notifications as they work through this thread.

Thank you for your patience and participation today! ✨

[genuinesw]

I added a new item today and it won't let me add stock #'s.  I can on my phone and if I go into online, but this item is only sold in the store.  I used to be able to add stock when working on my computer.  

[Inventory]

Hi @genuinesw - Sorry for this experience. This is not an intended behavior. Can you please share step by step information so that we can replicate the issue and fix this? Sharing screenshot will be very useful. 

[homeprogreen]

Any plans to add a discount button to PO’s? Right now we can add fees and have that cost automatically broken down among all items on a PO but if I create a 420 dollar PO and the vendor gives me a 10% discount off the order total I have to go in and manually adjust the price of each item in order to have accurate COG’s

[Inventory]

@homeprogreen  Thank you for sharing your feedback. We have heard this request from other sellers. In the coming days, our team will evaluate all product requests shared during AMA for backlog refinement.

[Paulyester]

There has been talk about making a 'kit' available comprised of individual pieces that are already in the inventory. This way we can offer a 'discounted price' for a bundled kit. It would also provide a 'list' for the CSA's to make sure the 'kit' gets all the pieces. 

[Inventory]

@Paulyester - Thank you for sharing your inventory use-case. It is currently not possible to set up an item bundle or kit for sale such that inventory is automatically decremented for each component of the kit when the bundle is sold. Our team is actively working on incrementally adding this inventory functionality. We will follow up with you for research as we build this. Stay tuned for updates. Please DM me your contact information.

However, it is possible to track item variation sales or other types of inventory adjustments in different units of measure through the same physical stock. This feature is currently available as part of Retail Plus package: https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5957-inventory-plus

We are planning to organize a training session on how to get started with sell-by units if you have a Retail Plus subscription. Stay tuned for the details!

Would you please confirm the full form of CSA?

[raj11]

I need to do a  physical inventory at end of year . Do you have any method to do that.

[Inventory]

@raj11  - Do you mean you want to do an annual physical stock count?

[Tom]

Update: The time for receiving new questions has closed. Thank you to everyone who asked questions and shared their experiences — we received a lot of useful feedback!

Our Inventory team will continue to address posts that came in during this event. Due to the high volume of interest, it may take a couple of days to follow up on the remaining posts. We appreciate your patience and please keep watch for updates throughout the end of the week.

[RiJu]

Today was beyond annoying. I had two large orders arrive that needed to be entered into the system. I had to save it after each entry otherwise an error would pop up. In addition to the error message for some reason, my Macbook entries were not showing in the system. With all of these issues, it took me from 10:45 am to 6 pm to complete the entries. I wanted to throw Square out the door. 

The error message said:

You tried to save an outdated version of this object. Please refresh the page and try again.

These were new items that arrived so there was no outdated version. 

So, almost every 3rd or 4th entry I had to refresh and re-enter items. If I tried to enter more than 3 items and then save the system errored and tossed out the work I had completed

The system also randomly popped up "offline" our internet connection was fine because I was using my Macbook online and our Sonos in store was still playing. 

[Inventory]

Hello @RiJu - I am sorry you had to experience this. Will you be available for a call tomorrow or Friday? I want to understand the issue so that we can fix it. Thank you!

[RiJu]

I will be available, but not at my store tomorrow. I called in two times last year and was told nothing was wrong with the system. I even did a hard shut down today to see if that would resolve the issue, but it did not. 

[Inventory · Accepted solution]

Thank you for every question, feedback and product request. Every discussion thread made this a very engaging and insightful AMA for our team, especially me, as the new Inventory, Product Manager. Your experience and feedback will help us revisit priorities for the product going forward.

We wanted to share a short recap on three themes that came up during inventory AMA event:

1. Bundles/Kits: This stood out as one of the most frequently requested product features. Our team is actively working on incrementally adding this inventory functionality. We will continue to follow up with you to better understand your use-case as we build this.
2. PO <-> Items Management:  This was another key area of interest that came up often and the overall sentiment was to have a more cohesive workflow as you make purchased items available for sale; and purchase more items from your vendor based on those sales.
3. Inventory Availability: We hear this loud and clear to have more accurate ‘available for sale’ inventory count versus stock you may still have on hand but committed through online orders or invoices. Our team is also actively working on incrementally building this functionality starting with invoices. Please stay tuned for the updates.

Next Steps:

1. Trainings: Our team will set up bite size 30 min live trainings for areas where you may need some help to set up or get used to. Our first session about how to set up and use ‘sell by units’ will be particularly helpful for current and future Square for Retail Plus subscribers. If you are interested, please submit your contact information here: 

   SIGN UP FOR TRAINING

   You can also use this form to share if there are any other topics/areas where training might help as you start or continue your Square inventory management journey.
2. Feature Discovery/Beta: We will closely partner with sellers who have shown interest in product features like kitting/bundling, inventory availability etc. for feedback as we build these functionalities and participation in a product beta rollout.

We are inspired by your diverse businesses and how you want to continue to improve Square’s products to save you time and make better inventory business decisions that directly affect your brand and cash flow. It was also amazing to see a sense of collaboration and trust, especially experienced sellers helping out other sellers with their experience, within and outside of Square.

For the latest updates on Inventory, visit Product Updates.

Again, thank you for your participation and stay tuned for our next Q&A!

[SPATEBoutique]

I would like to see an integration with Shopify for inventory.  I have tried to upload my inventory but the fields don't match and I get an error every time.