How are "default costs" determined?

[NobleScience]

I've been on Square for years but recently upgraded to Square for Retail Plus.  I've been tracking inventory for tax purposes manually in a spreadsheet but would like to start using Square.  I see there's a way in Inventory History to "Apply Default Costs", but I have not figured out how "default costs" are determined. 

I'm ultimately trying to figure out the least painful way to update it so everything that I currently have in stock has a cost.  Square says I have 170 variations and 281 stock actions are missing costs.

I don't particularly care about stuff that we currently have 0 stock of, but I'd like to make sure that everything that we currently have stock for has costs included.  How do I do that?

[Stacelyn24]

Hey there! 👋 You're asking a great question — especially if you're switching over from manual tracking to Square for Retail Plus. Here's a quick breakdown to help:

🔍 How "Default Costs" Work:

Square determines default costs based on the most recent cost you've entered for a specific item variation. If a cost hasn’t been entered yet (like in your case with older data), it’ll show as “missing” — which is why you’re seeing so many stock actions without costs.

✅ How to Fix Your Current Inventory:

Since you only care about items currently in stock:

1. Go to Items > Inventory > Stock Overview

2. Filter to show only items with Stock > 0

3. Click into each variation and enter the default cost manually (this will apply moving forward)

4. From there, you can use “Apply Default Costs” in Inventory History to retroactively update past actions if needed

💡 Pro Tip: You can also export and bulk edit your items in a CSV (via Item Library > Export) to update costs in one go — then re-upload the file. It’s a little extra setup but much faster for large inventories.

Hope that clears it up!

[NobleScience]

Hello, thank you for your response.  I'm in Items > Inventory > Stock Overview.

How do I filter items with Stock > 0?  At the moment I can only see filter options for Category, Inventory (All / Low Stock Alert / Sold Out), and Vendor.

Additionally, I can see no way to click into each item to enter the default cost from the Stock Overview screen.  How am I supposed to do that?