How to change to see negative inventory vs “Sold Out”?

[MikeSL]

Today, my items list switched from showing negative items to “Sold Out” this is huge issue. How can it be switched back???

[#2]

You'll find the toggle in the Square Dashboard. 

Click on Items > Click on an item > Click on Stock. In the overlay that opens, you will see a toggle with the label "Tracking."

I expect we will be able to remove the Sold out label tomorrow! The red highlight styling will remain.

[#3]

Hi everyone 👋

I saw that a few of you had posted about this topic, so I brought the threads together so I could respond to you all! Sorry to hear about the troubles here. I've gone ahead and reached out to the team that launched this feature, and directly provided them quotes and feedback from this thread.

I'll be back with another post to provide updates when I have them.

[elaine_p · Accepted solution]

Hi @collinsandcoupe, I can give some more details about this. 

When an item variation does not have inventory tracking on, the toggle gives you the option to mark it as sold out manually. If you turn it on, then the item will have the red highlight in the Square Dashboard: 

In Square Online, the item will have "Out of stock" displayed on your site: 

  

In Square Point of Sale, it displays in your item grid grayed out with a strikethrough, and in the item search with a Sold Out label: 

 

In Square for Retail point of sale, there is no change. To see current stock at a location, you can tap on the item in the cart and there is a current stock row. When you do not track stock, it will say "Receive Stock". 

 

In Square for Restaurants point of sale, the item will be grayed out like several examples in this screen shot.

Hope that helps! 

[FGI]

All items are clicked Available and show they have stock
in Dashboard they show a red circle around the number.

[Valentina]

The Best Answer in this thread should help shine a light, @FGI.

If it doesn't, please get in touch with our team so we can dig in with you here!

P.S. Welcome to the Seller Community ✨

[crystalimages]

Is it a full red background highlight or just a red circle? 

What are your settings regarding low stock notifications?

Is it notifying you that you have at or under the amount you set to be notified of as "Low stock" so you can order before you're out?

That would be my first guess without looking... 

If that's not the case, that might be a good use of this...

Just a red circle (white filled) when low, and full red when 0 or negative.

[cwilliams112]

I haven't read through every post in this thread but I'm really hoping there is a resolution in here somewhere. 

While I do not use the negative numbers like some sellers, I manage my inventory for both an online store, and for farmers markets three days a week. Some items are limited, those I assign an inventory to at the beginning of the week so we don't oversell them in the online store. Our online store and all locations share one 'square location' since there was never a satisfactory solution proposed to that aging issue (shared inventory management across several locations.)

This now means that while I may sell through something early in the week in my online store and early week market, by the end of the week I could have more of a given crop available, so I bring it to market, and do NOT update my inventory, as I only do online sales early in the week. 

Now my employees are confused as hell and ringing things out in completely non-sensical ways because all of the sudden a ton of our items are listed as sold out in bright red letters. Either because we sold out early in the week for the online store, or because we continue to track inventory on them as I do not turn that on and off unless it's a current item in the store we have enough of coming in that  I KNOW I'm not going to sell out of it. This means almost everything not listed in our online store has negative inventory associated with it. 

I seriously just want a way to toggle the 'sold out' labeling OFF in our point of sale interface, as it's not only useless, it's incredibly confusing and caused employees who were trying to avoid the big scary red letters to under or over charge about 100 customers on the week this launched. I know we shorted the farm at least $200 in one item, but it's hard to say how much we overcharged our customers.

Get it together Dev Team, this is NOT the kind of feature you roll out without warning, and without a way for people to switch it back. This is something all of our employees were taken by surprise with, not some small feature change to the back end of inventory management. I'm super frustrated, and really hoping this is rolled back or we're offered a way to toggle the new feature asap. Thanks. 

[JJ_]

Hey @cwilliams112 👋

I have been investigating your request and found out that the Sold Out future is tied to inventory tracking if you disable inventory tracking this should disable the "Sold Out alert"

If this is not the behavior that you are experiencing, I would suggest you reach out. Our Support team would be able to look into this with you! When you have a moment, please reach out directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[cwilliams112]

Hi JJ,

Please re-read my post. This does not solve the issue as I manage inventory across multiple ‘locations’, only one of which (the online store) where the inventory matters. 
I will spell out how we use square so hopefully this will make more sense. Embedded in this response is some feedback about other issues, I believe all of which I’ve given in other threads, if there has been progress on any of them I’d love to hear about it as well.

I run a mixed vegetable, cut flower, and mushroom farm. We use square for managing all of our transactions and billing. We have a CSA, wholesale accounts, and (most importantly for this discussion) attend four farmers markets, 3 days a week. Additionally we offer pre-orders for folx to pick up at our farmers markets or during our CSA pickup. 
On Sunday or Monday we update inventory in our online store, as people have to order at least a day ahead of their pickup. Squares automatic pickup times are another feature we wish we could turn OFF because it’s not helpful for someone who orders on Monday for pickup at our Saturday Market that their order will be ready on x day at x time. We have lots of ugly reminders letting our customers know to ‘please ignore what square is telling you above, they do not understand how our business works! Please show up at the pickup date and time you selected for your items’. Unfortunately we still get people showing up to our farm at these times or calling us about them, very confused. We have 3 set pickup times at different locations. We update inventory for items we know will be limited for the week, and leave items that we have plenty of with untracked inventory. Often this means projecting out our harvest through Tuesday, but with some crops it’s difficult to estimate beyond a few days what will be pickable.

This is a farm so our ‘inventory’ is constantly changing, and the updated inventory for the online store is just a guess at the beginning of the week of what we’ll. It’s usually a conservative guess, to avoid overselling a crop. Our inventory is only updated once a week, I will reiterate it is only managed for the sake of the online store.

 Starting on Tuesday we begin attending farmers markets for the week, and are harvesting produce every day. Since our Market sales draw from the same inventory as our online sales (for our record keeping we need to use the same items, someone proposed a separate set of items for the online store but that’s impractical for other reasons), and due to our wish not to over sell something through preorders, we almost always sell more of an item than the amount our  inventory was updated to. We harvest over 50 crops (and sell many of them in several sizes or increments), and it would be an absolute waste of time and energy to update our inventory every day. In most of our sales, aside from the online store, people can only buy what’s in front of them, so inventory tracking is irrelevant.

Unfortunately this means that usually by Thursday we have sold more of some items than our original online store inventory, making inventory negative.

 Negative inventory has never caused any issue for us, nor is it something we keep track of.

 However when items started appearing as ‘sold out’ highlighted in red, the change served it’s purpose, as universally intended by some highlighting something in red. It lets people know they shouldn’t use that button, causing a great deal of confusion when the item is clearly in front of them. As I stated in a previous post, this has caused well-meaning employees to over and under charge our customers by seeking alternative items to ring out when confronted with a button they read as unusable, because it says sold out and is highlighted in red.

i know many many farmers who use square in ways similar to us, many of whom are not very tech savvy, and almost all of whom wouldn’t spend their morning breaking down these challenges at 4 am before their work day starts. So please, I spent a lot of time trying to help you guys understand how our business uses square and inventory management. I would appreciate if you took our feedback to heart instead of sending me another cookie cutter response that does not purpose a viable solution to the issue, or recognize the challenged brought up in the post. Thank you.

[JJ_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @cwilliams12 and sorry for the delayed response. 

I passed your message to the team in charged of this recently released feature to have better understanding on how we can help you and here is what they shared:

"This is a feature that was rolled out as part of the Refreshed Point of Sale application, if this feature is not working properly for them they can do one of three things:

1) Revert back to the original (legacy) checkout experience as that version does not behave the same way. You may do this by visiting your checkout settings and tapping on "Revert to previous experience"

2) Track stock for the item variation at the online location, but not for the farmer's market locations.

3) Don't track stock at all and hide the items online when the preorder time is up. This will have a drawback of letting you oversell. This can be accomplish by changing the item visibility to hidden on the Online dashboard."

The team is working hard on making this feature work for everyone and they have captured your message to keep it in mind while the development continues.

I appreciate your patience and the time you took to help us understand the situation that you are facing.

[cwilliams112]

Hi @JJ_ ,

Thanks for your (and the feature teams) thoughtful response.

1) I will look into using the previous version, I tried to figure out how to get to a point where I could use a legacy version but don't see it in the setting I was able to find. Could you tell me the path to get there?

2) Alternatively, is there a way now to set the online store as a different location and have it draw from the same inventory? Or are you saying there is a way to manage inventory tracking differently, while still pulling from the same inventory? This would be a great solution, I know many sellers have requested multiple locations that are able to draw from one inventory for quite awhile now, maybe I missed a feature launch!

3) While I get the concept, this one just isn't practical, we have hundreds (thousands?) of items and I would have to rebuild the stores catalog of visible items each week. It's just too clunky and time consuming. Plus it wouldn't avoid the sold out feature being an issue at the Tuesday market. Unless maybe there's a way to bulk edit and tag or flag a group of items, that could be easily filtered for and bulk edited to make visible/hidden? The tagging would need to be bulk editable as well so we could add/drop several items at a time. I'm wondering if adding a dummy category might work for that, or might that have unintended consequences elsewhere?

These are some great work around, fingers crossed I can figure out one to work for us.

Thanks again for you help!

[JLSGLG]

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING TO THE COMMUNITY AND LETTING US VIEW THE NEGATIVE NUMBERS!

Highlighting them in red is quite helpful, actually. That's all Square had to do in the first place.

[elaine_p]

We're looking into this @FGI!

[RofT]

Hi Elaine, You helped me before with this, but there is still something weird going on.  As a reminder, I do not track inventory and have never tracked inventory (thrift store).  It suddenly turned on and you fixed it for me.  Or so I thought.

I was increasing some prices today and when I went into some of them I noticed that the red negative inventory number was on there.  But when I look on my dashboard, it doesn't appear that the toggle for inventory tracking is on.  It's weird.  I found SEVEN items in various categories with this problem.  

What is the fix and why is this showing up in such a weird way?

[JJ_]

Hello @RofT 👋

If you believe your dashboard is behaving unexpectedly, I would suggest reaching out to our team. They can take a look at your account with you to help a shine light here, as they are able look at your account alongside you in order to pinpoint what's going on here. Please reach out by phone or email when you have a moment by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[VoidProductions]

Hello -- is there any way to change the red "Out of Stock" to say "Sold Out" instead on-site? It just reads better and would customers to view that then "Out of Stock".  Thanks!

[Kassi_]

Welcome to the Community, @VoidProductions - 

Thank you for coming to the Community with your question. It's great to see a new face!

Right now, "Out of Stock" is your only option and it cannot be edited. 

I can suggest adding this to the Ideate Board as a Feature Request, if you're interested.