Why no abililty to enter future purchase orders for new vendors and items not in current stock?

[Mannequinatsd]

Why do we not have the ability to enter future purchae orders for New vendors and itmes not in our current stock?  It would be great to be able to enter what we have on order and when it arrives be able to quickly transfer to inventory and print labels.  As it currently stands, the purchase order field is only for ordering additional items in stock or running short.  It would be nice to have both options.  

Thanks!

[BluePelicanOBX]

I'm trying out Square for Retail.  Ideally, I'd love a way to "receive" inventory through the Inventory Management system Purchase Orders.  With my "old" POS system, I'd enter the purchase order, click receive all, and the items would be transferred into my store inventory.  Right now, from what I can see, I will use the purchase orders to place orders with my suppliers but other than that they will have no real use because I will need to go into each item's inventory management and manually adjust the stock received.  Am I missing something? 

In the short term, and especially if that isn't an option, could you make it where there is an option to add new items through the purchase order screen?  This would save lots of time when ordering new items. Also could you make it so we can do inventory management on the same screen where we set stock alerts?

Thanks!

[Tom]

Hey @BluePelicanOBX, thanks for surfacing. I've escalated your post for further review and will circle back as soon as I have more information. Appreciate your patience in the meantime!

[BluePelicanOBX]

Thanks, @Tom.  I was just getting ready to update this.  I found the "receive all" button.  It does let the purchase order received information automatically update inventory under the inventory management tab.  However, under the items tab it doesn't show the inventory.  

I'm assuming that items and inventory managements are in two separate databases and each of those databases have an inventory on hand field...that's why it's hard to make them talk to each other?  Anyway, if you could put in the request to have these two parts of square for retail talk to each other in a subsequent update it would be awesome.

Thanks!

[Tom]

Glad you found it, @BluePelicanOBX! 💯

You're right on — you can mark an entire purchase order as "received" by heading over to the Purchase Order's page > click "Receive All" and the inventory at the specified location will be updated.

I will flag your request for more continuity with inventory and items to our Product Liaison team. We can certainly see how it would be helpful to permit item creation on the Purchase Order's screen, and that Stock Alerts should be on the Inventory Management tab.

Feel free to reach out if anything else comes up. 🙂

[BookstoreGal]

@BluePelicanOBX   Were you able to find a solution to this problem.. we are doing a trial and this is a big concern for us!

[Helen]

Hello @BookstoreGal! I'll check in with our team to see if there have been any updates on this request! As soon as I have an update I'll let you know on this thread! 

[Helen]

Thanks for your patience @BookstoreGal.

I just heard back from our team and at this time these features aren't available. I'm sorry! I went ahed and shared your request for these features with the team. 

If you have any other questions about Square Retail during your trial please don't hesitate to reach out!

[BluePelicanOBX]

Square has a Beta version that I have been playing with where the Item Library and Inventory Management pages do talk to each other - and you can update the quantity on hand of each item (or account for loss or damage) right on each item's page.  As of right now, I don't think that you can add new items to a purchase order.  You can save a purchase order as a draft and go back into Items and Create the new item.  Then when you reopen the purchase order you can add that new item to it, but there is a bit of backtracking. 

[PhoenixPearlTea]

Hi, I'm experimenting with Square for Retail, I have the free trial, and I just can't figure out a feature. So, I grasp the Inventory Management, I have learned how to put in item costs, vendors, purchase orders, location quantities, and alerts, but I can't find how to auto-generate a purchase order, let alone how to pull up a list of items from a vendor and make an order from that.

I would like to say "I want to make a purchase order with items from this vendor that are below their alert level in stock." Nice and easy, that's all I need. Honestly, I'd take "Generate an order of items from this vendor with their stock levels attached." But I can't find a way to do either. It's really the last thing I need from Square for Retail to make it work. Without it, it just doesn't seem worth it. Everything else about it seems great, but I really need order generation. Please help!

[lior]

Hello @PhoenixPearlTea, I am a Product Manager at Square working on our inventory features. Welcome to our community and thank you for taking the time to post! Auto generating Purchase Orders is a popular feature request that we are tracking very closely. I can definitely see the benefit and time saved from incorporating this into our existing Purchase Order flow. I'd love to hear about your experience on Square for Retail as we are always looking to improve our offering based on feedback from our sellers.  I'll reach out to you via a private message on our seller community.