Re: Feature Request: Bottle by the glass inventory
Posted
03-22-2022
We're happy to announce a new Square for Retail feature: Sell-by Units and Stock Conversion.
Square for Retail Plus subscribers will now be able to sell an item in different units, and track inventory with those units - for instance, sell candles by a case of 12, by a bundle of 6, or by a single candle.
Beverages like wine, beer and soda are bought in kegs, but sold by the glass, pint or pitcher. How can I track inventory for a beer that has 3 selling options (glass, pint, pitcher). Can Square reduce inventory on hand by the appropriate amount for each serving size? If not, does anyone have a work-around?
I believe you're referring to the feature request discussed in this thread. As of right now, there isn't a way to input a keg, and then every time you sell a glass of beer, have the inventory deducted from the keg.
We're working on making this feature available in the future, as we know it would be helpful to our sellers that sell beer and wine. But as of right now, if you have am item titled six pack in your inventory, and you sell one, the system will consider that as 1 item sold, rather than 6 beers sold from your inventory. If you'd like to track inventory accurately in that case, you would want to make each beer an individual item rather than '1 six pack'. I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if you have any questions about this.
You can learn about unit type and quantities with Square inventory here.
In the live inventory discussion you seemed to mention that we can start selling in multiple units from the same inventory if we have Retail Plus. I can't seem to find out how but I need this functionality in so many ways. A few examples:
1. We buy 10 Liter bulk Olive Oil & Vinegar and need to be able to create purchase orders for the larger units then sell 100, 250, 500ml bottles off of the same inventory.
2. I would like to be able to purchase a CASE of crackers (be it 8, 10, or 12) and then sell by the unit. This would help with the whole streamlining process of purchasing, receiving, and inventory management without having to memorize case sizes for each vendor.
3. We sell wine by the glass. Can we receive a 5 gallon barrel of wine then sell a 5oz or 8 oz glass and pull from the same inventory?
4. We do the same thing with cheese. We buy bulk cheese then break it down. There is currently no way to manage the inventory that we can find. I would love to be able to purchase a 5lb wheel or 10 lb wheel, then sell it by the 1/4lb or oz.
So this thread started in 2016? And Square still hasn't created an ability to deduct glasses of wine from the bottled wine inventory?
Any other work around I'm finding is far too confusing, and we're about to open for the first time and can't spend anymore time on this. It's disappointing that Square hasn't made this feature, and if it does come I'm guessing it will only be available in their extremely high priced $129 pm Square for Restaurant.
Working as a brewery using Quickbooks Online, we manufacturer kegs of beer but sell 12 oz and 16 oz tapped beer. Can Square sell a fraction of a keg? Or does it only handle units of 1,2,3.
As Quickbooks Online only uses bundles and not assemblies, I wanted to create create an item for Keg and another item call 12 oz Pilsner for example and have it pull from the keg by using a fraction of an item in quantity. Does this make sense? And will this work?
Here's what we do currently as a workaround: We created a customer named "Pours" and when we empty a bottle used for tasting or BTG, we "sell" the bottle to this customer for $0 (you have to adjust the price manually to $0 for each bottle in the cart).
The reason I don't use a 100% discount is that I don't want to count revenue selling the wine from the tastings/BTG plus the bottle when it's the same wine sold – if I sell both wine by the glass and the same bottle at retail and then discounted the bottle 100%, my gross revenue will be too high. This way, the revenue is only counted for the tastings/BTG from that bottle but the cost and inventory count is accounted for when the bottle is "sold" at $0.
Keep in mind that your costs may also show too high if you enter both a bottle cost and a BTG cost in their respective item listings in Square. I generally leave my cost per tasting/glass at $0. So in the reports it'll show me losing money on the bottle sale, but BTG are 100% profit... it all equals out in the end.
The other downside is that we don't usually ring this sale until after the bottle is empty, so the whole time we have an open bottle for tastings/BTG, our inventory available for sale will be +1 compared to the number really available for retail sale.
We are still waiting for a solution for this. If anyone has any ideas that doesn't involve discounting bottles or creating spreadsheets that would be great. Essentially we need every 5 glasses of wine sold to reduce the bottle inventory by 1.
We are just switching over to square and are having the same problem. I see this came up in 2017 and I would think that 4 years later Square would have come up with a solution by now. Very frustrated as the main function of POS is to sell items and track inventory. If a solution is found/created, someone please let me know
This is huge for things like soda as well. Tubs of ice cream with scoops per tub and selling cones, cups, milkshakes, floats (with soda off the gun and ice cream from the tub), sundaes.
SO many uses for our operation. Upvote for feature request.
Has there been any progress on this feature request? We have volunteers on our club bar, and can sell 40 glasses of wine or 8 bottles in a night. The work arounds are too complex for occasional volunteers.
