Is it Possible to Have Both Item Quantity and Price by Weight?

[EricCR]

The title of this thread has been edited by a Square Moderator from the original: grocery store - item quantities when you sell by the item, but still need to price by weight

We operate a meat shop that has 4 locations. We sell steaks, roasts, ground beef, and other meat related products. The problem I'm trying to address without having to go to an outside integrator is along the following lines.

I need to track inventory of our products. The best example will be Ribeye steaks.

I know I have 90 steaks in our inventory. And we charge a price per pound. Which means when we check out at the POS we will select Ribeye Steak and then choose the quantity as the weight of the steak itself. This works great. However you can't see how many steaks you have after that sale. Since the quantity is only by "weight"

Yes I could weigh all of the steaks to show I have 88.5 pounds of them, but doesn't tell me the number of steaks, just the weight.

Yes I am aware that an alternative is to create groups of steaks and charge a flat rate. That's what Shopify requires you to do. Creating tiers like this is honestly annoying, more work, and frankly a bad customer experience.

- Ribeye Steak .9-1.1 lbs

- Ribeye Steak 1.1-1.2lbs

- Ribeye Steak 1.3.-1.4lbs

So in my perfect world I would have the following.

The item quantity is the count of the "units". But when I check out I specify the weight of the unit as that will then determine the price to charge.

Am I alone in this goal? Anyone with a solution?

[Sammie_C · Accepted solution]

Hi @EricCR, welcome to the Square Community!

I did a bit of research on this and was able to find a couple things that may be helpful.

In order to create and edit item unit types:

1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items > Units.
2. Click Add a Unit or select an existing unit to edit.
3. Select a unit and set the precision of the unit.
4. Click Save. 

Or to apply item unit type to a single item

1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items.
2. Select an existing item.
3. Click Unit and select a unit.
4. Enter the unit cost.
5. Click Save.

Apply item unit type to multiple items

1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items.
2. Tick multiple items from the list > Edit items.
3. Navigate to the Sold by column and select a unit type.
4. Click Update variations.

I hope this helps a bit! If not, please let me know and I can dive into this again for you.

[EricCR]

Hi Sammie,

The two default choices are sold by "per item" and "pound". Right now the steaks are set with "pound". The "per item" doesn't work as far as I can tell. Here's why.

The "per item" is a fixed value per steak. Say $25.75. Yet each steak needs a weight as we charge $25.75 per pound.

To recap.

I have 10 steaks that range in weight from .9 to 1.1 pounds.

I need to know I have 10 steaks in inventory, but when I sell the individual steak I need to charge by the weight for whichever specific steak is sold. Once that steak is sold I need to see I now have 9 steaks in inventory. The sales report should show that I sold 1 steak at 1.1 pounds for $28.33

[Sammie_C]

Thank you for the clarification, @EricCR. I checked with our Operations team to see if they knew of a way to set it up for you and they said that the "sale per pound" should work for this.

They said that the only thing is that you would need to input the total weight of the steaks instead of the stock. So in this instance, instead of 10 steaks it would most likely be 10 pounds. So after each steak sold, in this example, for 1.1 pounds. The new available to sell amount would be 8.9 pounds versus 9 steaks.

I hope this helps a bit more!

[EricCR]

Unfortunately that doesn't work either. Yes I have the gross weight of the products but the unit count is still important. You might have gotten into the trap to assume that 10 pounds is close enough to the unit count that its fine. If I use our roasts you can see what that can be a bigger issue.

I have 60 pounds of round roast that range in weight from 2lbs to 6lbs. Do I have 10 roasts, 30 roasts or something in between? This is why the unit count is important. Knowing I have 60lbs is important. But also know I have 18roasts is too.

I did some research as well and I can see I'm not alone with this need and that some third parties have figured out a soluiton. I hope that I could get everything done soley within Square so perhaps something the product team can consider. Here are some of the resources I found.

SQUARE POINT OF SALE INTEGRATION WITH CUSTOM WOOCOMMERCE WEBSITE 

[Sammie_C]

I understand, @EricCR. After checking with our Operations team, they said the way that I mentioned is the only workaround that they are aware of at this time. I do apologize we don't have another way around this for you solely through Square. Adding on an integration is always an option in the meantime though.

If you have seen other posts with similar issues, I might recommend commenting on those threads or better yet, make a post on Ideate. Ideate is a great place to add new ideas and improvements to Square's products and tools that may be implemented by our project managers.

Again, I'm sorry we couldn't figure out a workaround for this! Please let us know if you have any other questions in the meantime.

[nortoncattleco]

Hi- 

  We also sell meat and I was just researching the same issue.  I tried to set up an online store, I don't know that I can physically go through every box of meat to input each weight on each steak, each roast or each package of ground beef. I have things set up by pound, but I'm going to get hosed when someone buys a brisket for $8.50/pound and it only charges them $8.50 for the whole brisket!! 

 It would be nice to have a way for customers to place an order for 25 pounds of ground beef, 2 roasts, 3 steaks and then give me the opportunity to manually send them a bill with the correct total. 

Maybe? 

Rachel