Stock not being recognised in POS app

[alansh]

I'm testing out the POS app on my iPad. When I got and add an item to the checkout list, it lets me do it and order way more than I have in stock - even if the stock is zero.

It does reduce the stock if the value in stock is positive - down to zero.

Is this a bug or am I doing things wrong?

cheers

Alan

[alansh]

So, the item in my online database item description says zero. The item description in the 'items' database says -21. So they are not syncing properly somewhere.

I am not sure this is right.

Alan

[alansh]

According to the 'sync' tab - this is NOT what I am seeing,

Product syncing

The following product information will always be synced with Square. This means that this information will always match when updated in either Square Online or Square Item Library.

• Product title

• Price
• Product ID (SKU)
• Stock
• Options
• Modifiers

[tranguyen]

Hi @alansh, thanks for your post! This is actually an expected behaviour at the moment.

When you're processing a sale from the Square Point of Sale app, you won't be blocked from selling an out of stock item and your stock can go into the minus.

It works a bit differently for the Square Online site. The Online site doesn't let you sell a sold out item or support minus inventory so that's why the lowest number displayed will always be 0. However, if you go to edit the item and click into the stock number, you should see the correct minus figure like the example below.

I hope this help!

[alansh]

Tra,

thanks for the reply. I am not sure why you allow people to sell negative stock.

This does cause me an issue. In the shop, we would be selling using the app as that is the device linked to the Square card reader. If we are allowed to sell items out of stock, then the whole system breaks down.

Our shop is not a place that people pick up things and bring then to the sales desk to purchase. We are slling small badges which people have a list of and are all stored behind the counter. So, we may not know if an item is out of stock until we physically go to the badge drawer and see it's empty. This is after they have told us what they want to buy and we have entered it into the App.

We may have to change our behaviour slightly to accomodate this (check the stock before we ring it up on the App).

Can I suggest that the App checks stock before it lets us add it - the same way as the web store? It would save a lot of time.

Cheers

Alan

[MJD]

@alansh If you're selling via POS the product should be their with you, therefore you know the stock better than the app, so it will let you sell it as you are guiding the sale rather than it being fully automated this. I guess this is just to avoid things showing as out of stock and slowing down a transaction while the customer is waiting. so long as it reduces stock at POS I don't see why it should cause any issue as you know better than the app when the product is there with you. as @tranguyen says it works differently on the website and will not sell past your stock count.

[alansh]

Matt,

This is the badge stock (well, part of it). It's a change in process to check the stock before we add it to the POS order. I would love it if the POS could tell us when the stock was low or gone and not let it get to (for example) -21 items [which I saw when testing]

[MJD]

I wouldn’t call myself a POS pro as I haven’t actually ever sold anything face to face with my customer but there might be a way to see I think, I’ll look into it but maybe @tranguyen will have some more info on this, I’ll always help where I can, anything else I’m here to help 🙂

[tranguyen]

Hey @alansh, while there isn't a way to stop stocks on the Square Point of Sale app to go into the minus, you can enable low stock alerts. If an item's stock count falls below a threshold you set, you'll get an email notification sent to your email address. 

You can learn more about tracking your inventory and creating stock alerts in our Support Centre. Hopefully this will help somewhat!