Variation inventory?

[BowenHeather]

Hi! Looking to update my inventory tracking and can’t seem to find/be able to do what I want. Curious if I’m missing it or it’s just not possible. 
On my square retail POS, my employee selects “Tops” from the left hand items menu. Then on the right he’s given the variation option. Say “Hoods,” “T-Shirts,” “Long Sleeve.” From there, he scrolls down to the modifiers. In this example the modifiers are the design on the top and size of the top- first set being “Hearts,” “stars,” “football.” Second set being “Small, medium, large.” 

Is there a way to populate the inventory so that when I select “hoods” from my variation list it’ll populate the inventory of each design(modifier) associated?  So if I select “hoods” it’ll show me I have inventory in the heart design. Then when I tap that it’ll subsequently show me how many of each size.

Orrrr am I asking too much if the system? I know how/where to enter inventory for each variation…ie- we have 32 hoods in stock. I just don’t know how to break that down even further, without creating new “items” 

[Donnie-M]

@BowenHeather Unfortunately, you can set up the "options" to cover how these show up in the point of sale and online, but they are still variations:

Hoodie Blue X-Large

Hoodie Blue Medium

Hoodie Blue Small Hearts

Hoodie Blue Small Diamonds

Are all gonna be a separate variation of the main item hoodie.  Modifiers won't track inventory, but are great for addons if you were doing printing etc.

You can track everything, but it is a detailed process when you are getting down to super specific item levels like this.  What I have seen done is use a category for Hoodie, then you do item level Blue and variation color/design.  If that becomes cumbersome then you back up and do the category as Hoodie then item level blue xlarge and variation is the design.  You end up with more items but less dealing with variation inventory.

Hope this helps,

Donnie-M

[BowenHeather]

That’s kind of what I assumed was the answer but wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Frustrating when you have pre-printed merch and want a faster, more efficient way to inventory. May look into a different option. Thank you! 

[Donnie-M]

@BowenHeather I might look at getting a bar code scanner and doing bar code labels for all of your products and just have a lot of items.  There are some integrations that probably can solve all of this for you and let you take advantage of some of the square ecosystem without having to piece meal it together somewhere else:

https://squareup.com/us/en/app-marketplace/search?query=inventory