Purchase Orders Creating Items with Unlimited Inventory

[EdwardP]

I just submitted this as a support request, but I am honestly so shocked that this seems like a potential glitch, that I am posting here.

I used the Purchase Order feature early on when I opened a store front earlier this year. I only used it a few times. I haven’t had time to keep up with that feature, and I generally love it and want to use it again in the future. HOWEVER, there seems to be a HUGE issue with Purchase Orders!
When I marked multiple items as “damanged,” “will not be fulfilled,” or otherwise as not received, it ended up setting my inventory for those items in my online shop as UNLIMITED! I had a customer order multiples of an item I marked as “will not be fulfilled” MONTHS AGO. I spent hours upon hours searching my physical inventory for these items. I finally discovered the issue. The item was not listed in my Square inventory (using the POS app), but it was in my Item Library (again in the POS app). The “Manage Inventory” section of the item allowed me to mark it as sold out or to receive inventory. When I did more investigating a bit ago, I was able to find other items with a similar status (where I marked as not received in Purchase Orders, but were not set to a 0 quantity).

They were all available on my online shop as being able to be purchased…in unlimited quantities. This is UNACCEPTABLE and must be fixed. 

[Sammie_C]

Hi @EdwardP, thank you for your post!

I am honestly not familiar with this particular scenario, but I would be happy to look into this for you.

I have a few quick questions:

• You mentioned that you put a support request in. Did our support teams say that this was working as intended?
• Do you by chance have a link to an item that this is occurring with? Or a screenshot that shows this issue?
• I see you mentioned that you tried editing this in your POS App, have you noticed this issue occurring on your Dashboard version as well?

These details will definitely help me figure this out for you. Feel free to tag me in this thread once you have that information.

[EdwardP]

@Sammie_C 

- They replied asking if I was using third party integrations, and I responded saying this was all within Square. They still haven’t responded. 
- I deleted the items because I didn’t want to leave them up and have the same issue happen (someone purchase inventory I don’t have). I did take a screenshot of the Purchase Order screen showing the item listed as not received.

- I did not try to edit the inventory in the Dashboard when I discovered this issue. I was more worried about getting the item removed asap. I did complete all of the Purchase Order actions in the dashboard months ago that seem to have caused this issue. 

[tomven]

Hi @EdwardP – this sounds incredibly frustrating!

I’ve had similar issues with a third-party integration called Trunk (it syncs inventory between Square and our Squarespace site). It randomly maxes out inventory on products – super annoying.

I suspect this could be why Square Support asked about integrations. Assume you checked?

You can see any connected apps here: https://app.squareup.com/dashboard/apps/my-applications

From what I understand, when items are marked as ‘not received’ or ‘will not be fulfilled’ in a Purchase Order, Square doesn’t automatically set stock to zero unless you manually adjust it. If the item is still active in your Item Library and inventory tracking is off, the Online Store can default to ‘unlimited’ availability.

How to check

> Go to Dashboard > Items > Item Library
> Open the affected item > scroll to Manage Inventory
> Make sure ‘Track stock’ is enabled and set quantity to 0
> If you no longer sell the item, toggle ‘Sold out’ or mark it as ‘Unavailable online’ (which sounds like you have already?)

Also, are you doing this on a tablet? If possible, try on desktop – Square’s web dashboard gives more visibility and functionality.

This would be a good feature request for Square though. It sounds logical to have the ability to automatically set stock to zero when items are marked as ‘not received’ or ‘cancelled’ in Purchase Orders.

[EdwardP]

@tomven 

I don’t use any third party stuff for Square inventorying. I do it all within Square and have Square sync to google and Facebook as channel listings. 
I use Square website for my shop (as a subdomain of my website). 

When creating Purchase Orders, you can create items? I think? When that item is created with tracking, why doesn’t it update though Purchase Orders?
we shouldn’t have to go in an update a whole other page after doing all the work within one page… within Square. It makes Purchase Orders kind of useless.

I don’t pay to use Square so I can do double the work.