Advanced inventory management - different inventory per day

[Danny-]

Hey there. We are a donut shop and bakery and are having major issues using Square online ordering - to the point that we may need to use something else. The issue that we are having is that the inventory tracking is only for 1 general inventory and doesn't help a bakery/restaurant out by not offering specific inventory PER day. 

For example, if someone places an order online on a Monday for pickup on Friday, the inventory is reduced right now as part of a general inventory. NOT as part of Friday's specific inventory. Because of that, it is truly impossible to know how many items you've already sold for a date in the future or limit how many items you even want to be able to be purchased on that Friday. 

What we do right now is update our inventory for all of our flavors (every flavor has a different quantity) each evening, but this still doesn't mean that our inventory is accurate because of the fact that people can pre order in advance and that inventory that was pre-ordered is not being subtracted from the correct date. 

The ideal scenario would look something like having the ability to set inventory of items in advance and per day. For example, being able to set the inventory of an item in advance for Monday-Sunday of the coming week. That way, when an item is pre ordered for a given day, the correct inventory is reduced. 

Does anyone have any input here? This is a major issue of ours and has led us to start looking at other POS systems, custom development, etc but we would love to continue using Square if possible. 

Thanks!

[AshleyK]

Hi @Danny- and thank you for sharing this. I can imagine how complicated it would be to manage rotating inventory like this, per day. As you know, we don't have inventory management directly designed for this, but a couple features you can consider to help is our Time-Based Categories and PeachWorks inventory management. 

Time-Based Categories only works with categories, but as a workaround, you can create the same item for each day of the week you're open and put that specific item in a Tuesday category, and another of that item in a Wednesday category, etc. Then, you can rotate the times these are available. 

Peachworks is also an app partner that you can consider looking into. It's designed for ingredient management and syncs with Square. 

I know this doesn't solve what you're looking for exactly, but hopefully it gives you a few tools to work with. I'm also tagging a few of our Super Sellers that have experience in restaurants/food to see if they have any tips for you!

@londontea @pessosices @MichiganFarmsta @bagelboss @Donnie-M @JamesSandbar @MAXSDELI @porktaco and @sugarlab

[MAXSDELI]

@Danny- @AshleyK : As much as I’d like to help, I don’t use inventory in our deli as it’s too much work with far too many variables to be of any use to us, sorry. 

[bagelboss]

@AshleyK @Danny- sadly we face a similar predicament at my bagel shop. Inventory isn’t realistic for our needs—too much adjustment would need to occur each day, throughout the day. Plus, our varieties are modifiers, not items.

Here’s to hoping a more robust inventory solution will soon become part of Square’s feature list!

[AshleyK]

@MAXSDELI That's ok!! 🙂

[sugarlab]

Hey Danny! Fellow bakery owner here. We have monthly rotating menus so a little different but hope this will help. 

We have two pages for our menu. The first is "available today", which is all the stuff we have in store right at that moment. We do inventory on it and once we're sold out, that's it. If they want to order for a future date, they would order off our "Monthly Menu" page. That part we don't keep inventory on since we make it as they specifically order, plus what we'll have for day-of purchases. The only exception to this is our French Macarons; when we are low of our overstock, we add an inventory to the monthly menu and just monitor what's in the customer case and what's in our freezer. That's our only item that is more time consuming so it's harder to make more on the fly. 

We've only had a handful of people order wrong, and thankfully it's been when it was slow enough to easily change the inventory. 

I would direct you to our online store to check it out but we're temporarily closed while we finish up construction. If you check back next week, I would have the full site up when we reopen. 

[sugarlab]

Oh one more thing to add. Every now and then we'll have pre-order items that are only available certain days. In the item description online, we put "Pick-up (day) ONLY" and then write it everywhere that the item is only available that day.