You’re welcome, of course. I think we can get you there. For the rest of this post I’m going with the obvious assumption that you are using the Restaurants POS.
When you “press and hold” an item you’ll see “Update availability.” If you select that, the edit item screen will come up at the Variations section. Here you can click Manage Stock beside each variation and then either mark as sold or use a stock adjustment reason (stock received or inventory re-count). Note that you can also do this from your POS > More > Items to edit from an item list rather than the grid.
For your online store, you will need to edit it. Then, in Shared Settings you’ll see “Item Preferences.” Here you will be able to toggle on “low inventory” and “out of stock” indicators. You’ll also be able to decide if you want out-of-stock items to show or be hidden from your online store.
Note that out of stock items on your POS will be marked as such. But, in cases where you have just a little more than you thought, it will warn you an item is out and you can decide right then whether to add it or not.
Obviously, this is not perfect but I believe it will do what you want. However, please keep coming back here and asking questions if you run into issues as you are trying this out for yourself.
Also, lastly, I’d strongly recommend that you go to the Ingredient Cost Tracking beta, which also includes item inventory tracking, and ask to join. You might not be able to use it right away as, like I said earlier, it is in its infancy. But it sounds like you are very close to being able to use this and help guide its development. From what I can tell, this is the first baby steps toward Square having its own in-house restaurant/bar costing/inventory functions rather than relying on third-party apps. I’ve been involved in tons of betas over the years and the ability to influence and give real-world perspectives on new functionality is definitely a plus, in my book.
Anyway, try over my suggestions above and come back here if we need to refine them more.
The item tracking has recently improved -- so YES you can manage inventory by choosing the 'track by availability' in the item detail.
This restores the functionality that existed in earlier Restaurants app versions. You can sell out an item, or add a count to track remaining, on the fly.
See screenshots for a food & beverage item below.
This can be managed via the dashboard, or directly from the Square for Restaurants POS by 'long-hold' on the item button.
The count can also be reset at the end of day, or a future date/time.
Hope this helps!
Jeff
Flour Moon Bagels
@BlasphemyBBQ a follow up to my suggestions above. I just submitted a feature request to the Restaurants team, asking for counts at the modifier level so that we can setup and do automated count-downs to using. Please follow this link and upvote that, if you would.
I did too! Thanks for submitting this @TheRealChipA! We've used Square since Day 1 and have gotten pretty used to the cumbersome way this functions, but this feature would be nice! We end up tracking a lot of it on a piece of paper at the register during busy shifts as well!
