Feature the Ability to Track Product Expiry Dates

[Zero-G]

Howdy

Can see this question has been asked many times, and am confused.

Is this under developement with Square?

or

Is this a paid app - like Beep on iOS?

If so, can I please have the name of the 3rd party app

or

something else?

As a gluten free business, the management expiration date of goods is one of the key inventory functions, and am perplexed as to why this is "missing".

The competitor Shopify offer on the Shopify app store
SS: Product Expiration Dates

This function is critical for my business.

Can I please have feedback?

[Sineaid]

Hi @Zero-G,

Welcome to the community, and apologies for the delay in getting back to you on this one. 

While the tracking of expiration dates is not included as part of your Square inventory management, I do know that our integration partner Thrive Inventory offers expiration date management options. 

I’ve also reached out to another of our partners, to query the functionality with them. I’ll get back to you here, as soon as I have a response from them.

In the meantime, you can take a look at Thrive on our App Marketplace and see some guidance on expiration dates from their help article here. 

[Sineaid]

Just an update on this @Zero-G,

I’ve had a reply from the other integration partner I reached out to and unfortunately the addition of expiration dates would be a manual process with them also, that wouldn’t result in approaching expiry notifications for example. 

My best suggestion at this point would be to reach out to Thrive, and review their resources on the expiration date management options they offer. 

I’ll also go ahead and move this post to the Ideate board, where our product development teams review suggestions and feature requests from our Sellers. 

[Ganda61]

Hi Zero-G

I am likewise in a retail business that needs to monitor expiration dates of my products as it will expire without monitoring them and get all recorded at a waste. It is a disappointment that we cannot get the development team to have this issue sorted as this is a very important part in the life of a retail business. 

However, the only solution I did is to record the expiration dates of the products under the category option as I can at least check items expiring each month and put them on sale before it expires.

The downside is because I used the category on my dashboard for the expiration date, I have to manually encode all my products on my website by category as it is important for the customers to browse products by categories, country, brand. This I have not achieved completing it yet as it takes a lot of time. 

I hope square can find ways to add an option to the system like the category option feature and name it as Product Expiry Dates to make the life of all retailers (groceries etc) more easier.

[CrazyChicksIT]

I need to enter Use By Date or Expiry dates for Consumables for Inventory Items in Square. I saw someone asked this question 2 Years ago but cannot find an answer.

[Laurie_]

Hi @CrazyChicksIT,

Thanks for reaching out with your question!

You're right; several Sellers have brought up similar feedback, and it's on our radar. I’ll move your post to an existing thread we’re using to track this request, where some workarounds and integration options that can help you manage product expiration dates have been shared.

Another workaround in addition to the ones already shared is to manually track this information by adding expiration dates in the item descriptions, variations, or custom attributes. It's certainly not a perfect workaround, but it's another idea to try to see if it works in the interim.

Hopefully, we'll see some improvements to inventory management features soon! If any changes are implemented, we'll be sure to announce them to Sellers through the Product Updates board.

[Ganda61]

Hi CrazyChicksIT

I find it useful to encode expiry date of items under the category item, and you can monitor which products are expiring each month. 

[CrazyChicksIT]

Thanks, I'll give it a try. How do you write stock off that has expired as currently for stock adjustments there is no "expired" only Damaged or Lost?

[lennys26]

A surprising omission from the Square system at this point especially with so many needing and requesting it. I too am desperately looking for a solution in my supermarket/retail environment.

Even just allowing the simple ability to add an attribute on per item/unit basis, (and allow it to be searchable/filterable) it would address the issue.

Can someone point me to the open Ideate on this? I will give it a thumbs up.

[lennys26]

With Square not providing a direct solution, and finding that all of the available options are too expensive, too involved, or just too complicated, I have begun to work on a solution myself.

I am building a separate application that will pull the data from the Square systems and provides tracking and visualizations so that one can keep item dates under control. It is currently in testing and it seems to check all of the boxes for my needs.

If anyone is interested, please feel free to give me a thumbs up or reply here and I will keep you informed when it is ready for wider release.

[Ganda61]

Hi Lenny

I'm interested to know about the application you are building. Please keep me posted on any updates.