Making purchasing and restocking easier with Square

[lennys26]

A few months ago I posted about PurchasingLens, a tool I built to help manage purchasing and restocking in my own supermarket using Square for Retail.

I’ve continued developing it and wanted to share some of its features with other Square retailers.

PurchasingLens isn’t intended to replace Square’s reporting. Instead, it uses your existing Square data to help turn sales and inventory information into practical purchasing decisions.

Some of its features include:

• Smarter reorder recommendations based on sales trends, stock levels and product availability, including time spent out of stock.
• Supplier-based purchasing lists to simplify preparing orders.
• Supplier cost comparisons when products are available from multiple vendors.
• Sales and inventory reports covering best sellers, sales velocity and inventory value.
• Recipe and component tracking for products made from other inventory items.

There’s a 14-day free trial if you’d like to see whether it’s useful for your business. You can cancel at any time, including after subscribing.

https://purchasinglens.lenstewart.com 

I’m still actively improving the app and would genuinely welcome feedback from other Square retailers about what would make purchasing easier for them.

Thanks!

[ChickenRacer]

Good to see you're still building this out @lennys26 ! Supplier cost comparisons and reorder suggestions are exactly where pubs lose time and money, as we've got a long list of suppliers who never quite match on price. Does it work with Square for Restaurants as well as Retail? If so, I'd be keen to give the trial a go in the quiet season.

[lennys26]

@ChickenRacer I use Retail and use it daily in that context, however there is no reason why it won't work in Restaurant. The business concepts that are addressed in the app are the same. Not to pat myself on the back, but I honestly find the app to be super-helpful for my order cycles. Not just suggesting, what needs to be ordered from who, but why (sales trends, sales velocity, etc).

I am going to drop you a private message.

BTW - Chicken racing. Neat idea, and good video. 😀

[ChickenRacer]

Cheers @lennys26, good to know it'll work on the Restaurants side too, and glad you enjoyed the chooks haha!

Some feedback from the pub side that might be useful as you build it out. We run two different counts:

• Monthly stocktake: we count every item down to the ml. It's for accounting, checking things are being rung up correctly, and spotting anything going "missing".
• Weekly stock count: purely for reordering, so we only count full cartons of beer and full bottles of wine and spirits.

The reason is time. We've got 160+ lines, and most of them sell in different ways (a carton becomes stubbies, a keg becomes schooners and pints, a bottle of spirits becomes nips). Our stocktakes generally come out OK, so doing a full count every week isn't worth the hours.

So my questions for PurchasingLens: can it work off a "full units only" count for reordering and still get the suggestions right? And does it handle the conversion from what we buy (cartons, kegs, bottles) to what we sell (stubbies, pints, nips)? If it can, that'd be a big help for pubs. I'll reply to your PM too.