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Inventory Q&A: Ask our product team anything about Square Inventory 📊

Calling all sellers — especially those signed up with Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants. Our product team wants to hear your inventory questions and feedback!

 

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On Wednesday, May 11th, we were grateful to have Mukta Dhanuka (@Inventory) and her team in our forums to address questions and feedback about Square Inventory. See the thread below for answers to your questions and keep watch for a summary of the top themes discussed.

 

To learn more about Square Inventory and its features, take a look at our Support Center: Basic Inventory Management

 

A few example questions:

  • What are the best practices that will ensure I'm getting the most out of Square Inventory?
  • What are the latest feature improvements with Square Inventory?
  • If Square Inventory could take care of "_______," it would save me so much time and help me run my business more efficiently.
  • I can’t seem to figure out “______” or I need help with “_________”.
  • An inventory issue that keeps me up at night is “____________”.
  • I wish Square for Restaurants or Square for Retail would support “________”.

 

Note: We can't share specific details on our product roadmaps, though this information will be helpful as we continue to make improvements.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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Thank you for every question, feedback and product request. Every discussion thread made this a very engaging and insightful AMA for our team, especially me, as the new Inventory, Product Manager. Your experience and feedback will help us revisit priorities for the product going forward.

 

We wanted to share a short recap on three themes that came up during inventory AMA event:

  1. Bundles/Kits: This stood out as one of the most frequently requested product features. Our team is actively working on incrementally adding this inventory functionality. We will continue to follow up with you to better understand your use-case as we build this.
  2. PO <-> Items Management:  This was another key area of interest that came up often and the overall sentiment was to have a more cohesive workflow as you make purchased items available for sale; and purchase more items from your vendor based on those sales.
  3. Inventory Availability: We hear this loud and clear to have more accurate ‘available for sale’ inventory count versus stock you may still have on hand but committed through online orders or invoices. Our team is also actively working on incrementally building this functionality starting with invoices. Please stay tuned for the updates.

 

Next Steps:

  1. Trainings: Our team will set up bite size 30 min live trainings for areas where you may need some help to set up or get used to. Our first session about how to set up and use ‘sell by units’ will be particularly helpful for current and future Square for Retail Plus subscribers. If you are interested, please submit your contact information here: 

    SIGN UP FOR TRAINING

    You can also use this form to share if there are any other topics/areas where training might help as you start or continue your Square inventory management journey.
  2. Feature Discovery/Beta: We will closely partner with sellers who have shown interest in product features like kitting/bundling, inventory availability etc. for feedback as we build these functionalities and participation in a product beta rollout.

 

We are inspired by your diverse businesses and how you want to continue to improve Square’s products to save you time and make better inventory business decisions that directly affect your brand and cash flow. It was also amazing to see a sense of collaboration and trust, especially experienced sellers helping out other sellers with their experience, within and outside of Square.

 

For the latest updates on Inventory, visit Product Updates.

 

Again, thank you for your participation and stay tuned for our next Q&A!

 

View Best Answer >

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Square has been an amazing reach out partner and I really enjoy many aspects. One of my issues with the inventory is you cannot see the date that it was first entered or it does not allow you to post a date for incoming product. It would be so helpful toI know when I purchase something and how long it took to sell. Is this something that can be created?

may you walk in Beauty 

rocki

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Hello, 

 

Not sure if this is what you're looking for but - we use Square for Retail Plus with stock tracking. Just above the variation section when you look at a specific item is a link that says "view stock history." If you click on this, it will show you the date the items sold and when the items were received. I have put some pictures below. Hope this helps!

View Stock HistoryView Stock History

 

Stock History with DatesStock History with Dates

 

 

Lauren M.
Geez Louise Boutique
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The best way to do this is with a Retail Plus account. If you navigate to Items > Inventory Management > History you can filter by time frame (for example “This year”, a search for a specific item. This will allow you to see all the instances where you received that type of item and all of the sales. However, we hear you. It would be much easier if there was a single report like an Inventory Aging report. What information would you expect to see in an inventory aging report from Square?

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We have been using square for many years and we like the ability to keep track of number of items that we sell. However, I do not want to use it to track inventory. We did try inputting an inventory for a few items, but decided we do not have the staff or the need to track our inventory through Square.

 

Is there some why to remove the inventory tracking other than deleting the item then re-inputting the item? I have negative numbers that show up and it is distracting for square to say the item is sold out. 

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Square

@Mtherbal1 Thank you for reaching out. You may be able to turn inventory tracking off in bulk using items excel export and import. Please refer to the last section of this document for details: https://squareup.com/help/ca/en/article/7746-tracking-your-inventory-with-square-for-retail?utm_medi...

 

Also, we would love to set up a call with you to learn from your inventory tracking experience with Square. Please DM me your contact info.

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It would be very helpful if my weebly website's inventory could be reflected on my Square register/Square dashboard

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Thank you for reaching. Inventory is synced and reflected across Square products like Square Online, POS, invoices etc. Can you share your use-case in detail so that we can help?

Pong Issara Paoluengtong
Product Manager, Square for Restaurants | KDS
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Sure,  my website which is on Weebly which has an inventory count yet it doesn't sync to my Square register used in my retail location inventory and vise-versa. I would like to have one inventory count instead of two!  Thanks

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When we deliver items to a customer we invoice them and they have a net 30. However the square inventory does not remove the stock until the invoice is paid for.  When we try to use the inventory feature we are unable to because it is never accurate due to this issue. On our website it will say, for example, 3 in stock when we really only have one in stock because we delivered the other two items to customers and invoiced them. Therefore we don't use the inventory system at all. It would make it much easier to run our business if we were able to use it.  

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We are in the same boat, about half of our business is invoiced with payment terms. This makes inventory functionally useless for us and we fully stock count every month end. We need a product that removes inventory when invoices are created/fulfilled, not when paid. Without confirmation if this is even on the road map we will likely be forced to move to a system that better supports managing inventory.

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Let me know when you find 1 thx.

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@tidytech @Volpi Thank you for sharing your feedback. Our team is working on a solution to display an available inventory count which updates upon invoice creation rather than payment. We are looking for sellers to participate in the beta release of the feature, let us know if you are interested!

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@ms11 That is great, we would love to be in the Beta. How do we go about signing up?

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@Volpi @tidytech Sounds like the same issue we're having with invoicing not decrementing at time of creation...  see this (Archived) thread for more:

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Read-only-archive-Square/Feature-request-for-Invoices-Inventory-i... 

 

However, it was brought up in this discussion thread today... just search for @Paulyester  to see it...

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I would love it if Square would add a tare portion in the checkout for vendors who sell by weight, and allow us to sell by the pound online in increments less than a pound, example 1/4 lb.

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Hello @cleanrefillery - Thank you for reaching out. Can you please clarify if this request is for Square Online or for tare to be added to our POS/scales integration?

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We need the ability to have backroom stock vs stock on the retail floor! Is this something that is coming? It would be a great feature to know what needs to be restocked on the retail floor. 


 

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Would also be great if the back room storage feature also included the option to list a shelf or rack location, e.g. Rack B4 or bay 1, shelf 4.

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Wait, there's a backroom storage feature?!?!

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For real. What is this [potential] magic??

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haha we are being hopeful. Having a floor inventory and backroom would for sure be lifechanging!

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