Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode, our Host Zach Malloch is joined by Support Specialist, Daniel Rotondi to discuss the point-of-sale Inventory Posting utility. Daniel walks through why/when you would want to use the Inventory Posting utility, the relationship between purchase quantity and sell quantity, and some inventory reports that directly tie into this module.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:00
Hello and welcome to RecChat. Today we have a special episode with our buddies, Dan and Seth joining us. And with us, as always is Bret, we're going to be talking about inventory posting. So the inventory module is pretty powerful, very flexible thing. But you get kind of more power, more flexibility. If you do this extra piece that you know, is not necessarily the most common piece for people to adopt. A lot of times, you'll get set up in RecTrac with your inventory, and you'll just kind of start processing and then you could be interested in coming back to it later. And then sometimes later just doesn't happen. So it's actually pretty straightforward and pretty easy. So we're going to have Dan, talk to us about that. Before I hand it over to Dan, I see he's ready to go. I would just like to take Bret's piece here and remind everybody that we have the q&a area down at the bottom of the Screen. If you Click on that, you can ask us questions, it gives us a little bit more tracking as far as which questions have been asked which ones have been answered. If you have just a general comment a little bit less important thing or just a piece for the gallery, just go ahead and Type that into chat. And as always, we're recording this, we'll be posting it afterwards. So if there's anybody that you're going to might use this at your organization who's not here, you can certainly send them to the archive before too long. But that being said, I will get out of the way and hand it over to Dan. Dan, how you doing today?
Daniel Rotondi 1:33
I'm doing well, Zach, thank you for having me. And thank you for everybody for joining this session. Let me just share my Screen and we can get started.
Zach Malloch 1:43
Sounds good. And of course, Bret and Seth will be monitoring our questions. So if we get anything, we'll bring it up and just make it a part of the conversation.
Daniel Rotondi 1:53
All right. So I would imagine as Zack mentioned that many of you are already familiar with the Point Of Sale inventory management, may have set up some inventory items in the past and have been maybe selling everything successfully. And you might have some items like this that are in the negative because you know, maybe you're not familiar with actually posting inventory and not too concerned about it. But this is maybe an opportunity to learn more about it and maybe get some more metrics and data on your inventory sales. So if you are one of those people, maybe you're coming into POS inventory management, and just saying, you know, we took a new order of Ben and Jerry's here, and now we have 150 items on hand. Well, that is a possibility it will work you are updating the quantity on hand and you now do have 150 to sell through global sales. But what you may already be aware of with this method is you actually lose out on the last cost and average cost and some other metrics that potentially your organization might be interested in. So doing it this method is not recommended. And that is why we do have this inventory posting utility. So to get to inventory posting should be accessible directly from the main menu. And you should see it right here when you search for it by name. Once you're on inventory posting, I do just want to highlight that we have this this Field level help. And we are going to be going through all of the different posting options today. But in case you know, there's something that you wanted to dive a little bit deeper into, make sure that you Click on the Support icon, Toggle on that inap help here. And then next to the inventory posting tab, you actually have that icon here and a topic doc available for you. That's going to cover everything that we're covering today on the RecChat. So just as another utility for you to keep in your back pocket.
So now, on the inventory posting Screen, we have all of these different posting options. And as we choose an option here, you'll see this top settings group area actually changes and has a few other options available. The first one I wanted to highlight was physical count. Now, physical count is used. Let's say you do a inventory count at the end of every month and you want to get a physical count for everything that's on hand currently. This is the recommended way to go about updating those quantity numbers. Now here we would set this to physical count. You'll notice that if I pivot back to the In App help here, Physical Count actually recommends that you use a inventory Physical Count worksheet, and this report here is accessible. From report output listing, I just filtered it down by inventory. And you would find this report under POS inventory dash inventory inventory, Physical Count worksheet, just an example here, on the side is kind of what you can expect to see, you know, you have your items, and your purchase, count, your inventory count and your cell count. So as you're working through your your store, or your warehouse, or wherever you're holding your inventory. And you're, you're updating this worksheet with the amount that you're actually seeing, this will be a huge resource, again, when you're coming back to actually post that physical count. If you're not sure what we're talking about here with purchase count, inventory count and cell count, those are controlled, let's use, maybe my Heddy topper can here as an example. Those are controlled on the POS inventory update Screen. Over here, under Additional Settings group, you have your units of measure. So you have three here in this matrix, your sell unit, your inventory unit and your purchase unit. And a good way to kind of think about that relationship is the purchase unit is kind of what's coming off the truck, like what are you actually purchasing. So in the case of beer here, these would come in like a flat or like a box. And there's typically 24 cans in a box. And that's where you see these sell units per purchase unit inventory unit is a smaller unit of measure here. So of that, six, four packs of cans fit in the flat. So so we have that built out here. And in each of those four packs, you have four cans. And so these fields are actually just normal fill in text fields. So you can label these units of measure, whatever you want, you know, specific to your inventory item code.
So once we have those built out on the inventory, and we've run our worksheet, and we now have a purchase count, inventory, inventory count and cell count for our our items, we can go back to inventory posting, posting option, physical count, will select the item, first item on that report that we want to go through and update the physical count, and we would hit select down here at the bottom. And then now we have that new sell quantity, new inventory quantity and new purchase quantity. So it does this here. You don't necessarily need to enter an amount into each one of these to process it really depends on how you're doing the count. So if your clerk or your warehouse employee is going through and counting how many four packs full four packs of cans you have, then I would say, you know, enter that amount here into the inventory account. If you're counting by the flat, then purchase quantity, if you're counting by the individual can you could update that there. So let's say we go through and we count that we have, you know 160 cans on hand. We can adjust the date from the Screen if we want to post inventory at a date other than today. And then the majority of these other fields you'll see were pre populated you won't be visiting these because they are again controlled from that inventory update Screen and we actually made an inventory item selection prior to getting on this physical account posting Screen. So once we have the new sell quantity, you can go ahead and process and then you will see that new quantity is now should be on hand here if we refresh.
Let's see not seeing it here. Believe it may be reflected in the inventory management Screen after posting that there we go. We saw that update to 160 we may need to reload inventory posting to have it reflected in that DataGrid but we can now see that the new quantity on hand is 160 cans. So that's pretty much it for the physical count posting option. Like I said that worksheet is going to be a huge resource. You know maybe print this out and and hand it to the staff that's actually doing the count. And then when you're coming back in to post that, it would just be referencing that report that they handed back to you and going one by one down the list for each item here. Next, we have a few other posting options here post orders, post receiving post reductions and post transfers. Now starting with post orders, this is a way for you to create kind of a purchase order and assign items to a specific purchase order number, you actually have the ability to delineate which vendor you're going to be purchasing this from. And there's actually some information associated with the vendor as well. These can get built out but they are unnecessary piece. But just just contact information, purchase dates, and things of that nature. With those with this purchase order, we can add items to the order.
So if you're placing an order with your vendor, and you say, you know, I want a certain amount of flats of this Type of beer a certain amount of this Type, you would then after placing the order, come back into inventory posting and do post receiving, purchase order match, a populate it with that number. And you can go through that process there. And that way, everything that's populated on this posting items DataGrid would match that purchase order that you posted when you initially ordered those items. Now, that is a way to kind of control almost like the chain of command there where you're, you're, it's more true to real life where you're actually you know, putting the amount that you ordered in to RecTrac and then telling RecTrac How much you actually receive so that you can kind of have that checks and balances there. But if you didn't want to go through that whole process of posting orders, and then posting proceedings, you could just do post proceedings, individual items here. And so now you're not actually associating these inventory items with a purchase order.
The truck shows up, you take account of what you received. And and you can post it directly into inventory that way. So here if we set posting option to individual item, we have our Hetty topper here that we just received a few flats of. So we'll hit Select. And then here, the important fields that I want to highlight, where you're actually going to be filling something in is this purchase quantity received and the new purchase unit cost. You'll see everything above kind of was pre populated again, from that the inventory update Screen, a lot of information that you're already familiar with this item. But down here is what's important, you know So, so this shipment of Hetty topper, we received maybe four flats, and again, this is the purchase quantity. And that if you wanted to do it by cans, if you were more familiar with with the individual cell quality, a core quantity, excuse me, you could enter that in over here. And then adjacent to those two fields is how much you're actually paying on a per unit cost. So when the unit here is the flat or the 24 cans, and we're you're we're paying a wholesale cost of about $4 per can, you know one flat here would be that $96 And then same thing here if you were to enter this you know as a cell quantity, you would enter in you know how many individual cans you received with this order and then that $4 per can now it's important to pick one one or the other, I believe as to get these calculations correct there. So again, you have that posting date. And then you can say you know MSRP price as well. So we're going to be selling these at a 50% markup or margin or sell them for for $8 there so once we have that info entered, we can hit process and then we should see that updated we may have an issue with this DataGrid again, we should see that new quantity on hand updated
Zach Malloch 14:56
its cost and a few pop out of that tab and just reopen it
Daniel Rotondi 15:00
Yeah, I'm thinking it made more work may need to be reloaded.
So we added 160 before with the physical count, and then we just had it for flats there. Yep. So our new quantity on hand is 256 cans.
Zach Malloch 15:23
Maybe Bret, could you make a note to write that up? It doesn't seem the inventory posting DataGrid is refreshing. Closing the tab and reopening it. Yes.
Daniel Rotondi 15:34
Thank you, Brett. Yeah, so just something to be aware of. But another way to verify it is that quantity of hands should then match, you know, here in Point Of Sale, inventory management. Now, the, the again, the reason that we're going through this process, instead of just inline editing, inventory management is because that little piece of where we added that per unit cost. So you can see here, in line, we now kind of have that, that last cost and average cost. And so if I've been doing this correctly, it should have those match. Because, you know, in a perfect world, you know, there's no inventory loss, and when we're, you know, selling everything that we come in, but because we did that physical count, and we realized that we had you know, 160 cans that were maybe unaccounted for, that's why my number is getting getting skewed there, as you notice what the physical count, we didn't actually enter in that last cost. For the purchase order,
Zach Malloch 16:48
I think this is something that you've illustrated very well here, Dan, but just to call out kind of specifically, when you're doing the physical count, whatever number you Type in there will replace what the current number is. Whereas when you're doing the receiving, you're adding to whatever your current numbers are. So that's kind of a pretty important distinction between those two things.
Daniel Rotondi 17:07
Yes, thank you, Zack. And I, I just want to point out that, you know, if you are going to be using any of these inventory, financial reports, you're going to want some some data in there for last cost average cost in order for these calculations to work properly. By just either changing the data grid or doing the the physical count every time to change it, you're losing out on that functionality there and that reporting capability and we've definitely seen handfuls of support calls come in that mentioned that their calculations are often it usually has to do with how they're how they're actually posting inventory here. So we went through these, the invoice balance is similar where instead of you're matching the items of a purchase order, you're actually inputting the the amount of the invoice and totaling it up by how much you paid for all of the items making sure that every last penny is allocated into the inventory items that you received.
The other two options here for posting is a post reduction This is best used in the case of like spoilage you know, that's where we see most commonly utilized is if you have some some produce or items that go bad, you can post a reduction here as well and that will help you know take into account how much you paid for those those items and and make sure that your calculations are are correct moving forward. Post reductions can also be used if you're if you're damaging out an item for maybe a display or something like that. And you still want to account for how much you paid for that item but you're not actually taking in any any fees or money for that item. And then finally post transfers here is if you have multiple snack bars or locations or inventory warehouses and you're are trying to move inventory around to meet the demand so maybe you know maybe in the winter, the snack bar by the pool isn't seeing as much action as the indoor snack bar is, you know at the community center. So then you can do a post transfer there and transfer it out out of the pool snack bar and yeah, into the indoor snack bar and then everything will be properly allocated there. Now ZACK I can see it's a, it's 220. Already, I kind of hit on all the different posting options. I wanted to make sure we had time for questions. Is there anything that I may have missed that you guys wanted me to highlight? Are we getting into questions in?
Zach Malloch 20:14
So Gary asked a quick question. And Seth was helping him with that. So maybe Seth, you could chime in also, if you don't mind. But maybe you could talk about the report Button at the bottom of the Screen there, Dan. So Gary's question was about viewing the purchase order history.
Daniel Rotondi 20:32
We'll see this one here.
Zach Malloch 20:37
So there's, there's one thing that's a little bit or I'll just go ahead and make this real quick. And I'll definitely talk and address anything. So when you just use that Button at the bottom of the Screen, it's going to it's going to really focus on what you've done in this session of that process. Like you noticed that Dan clicked on it, he didn't really have any criteria come up, it didn't ask him for a date range or to filter anything. It just shows him the things that he's done during his current session. If you want to get the historical stuff, then you're actually getting into some, you know, just Point Of Sale reporting. And this is where maybe Seth and Dan might have a little bit more recent. What were what reports would you recommend most for those? I would assume probably something in the inventory setup side.
Seth Warren 21:26
Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, certainly, I think there are some reports that the other thing too, I think I recommended was looking at purchase order management. Just if you're, you know, if you're, if you're looking just to maybe pull up like an old purchase order versus, versus trying to compile, you know, list of purchase orders from the past or within like, a date range. You know, certainly going through purchase order management would give you data grid with, you know, all sorts of fields, whether it's the record statuses for the purchase orders, the dates, and then you could filter to, you know, if you're looking for something specific on that purchase order itself. I guess from a reporting standpoint, though, if you were looking for more of like a list of, you know, all the purchase orders, you ran back at, you know, December of last year, you know, to close out, you know, for you know, or you just want to look at like 2020 One's purchase orders the
Zach Malloch 22:29
Screen right there, actually, yeah, I think so, inventory posting reports one of the fixed ones under dash inventory, so right there. And then when you run that you have all the criteria to select your date ranges. Now, one thing just, it's probably a gap in my knowledge stuff, but I thought that that particular purchase order management was more for MainTrac than for inventory purchase order stuff.
Seth Warren 22:57
Oh, it very well. Could be Zack that maybe that's a gap in my knowledge. I just, I just started typing in RecTrac The to find, you know, to because I assumed we had something that may change them here. But
Zach Malloch 23:12
yeah, that is actually a good point. And I believe that that's been a gap a little bit of a gap and what we have were like you you Type in the number when you're doing inventory posting, you go to your to your post order. And you just Type in a number there and I think it just I don't know, other than running a report if there's a good way to see those numbers actually, that might be a question to our audience. Is anybody out there somebody that currently uses the inventory posting piece? And if so, are you aware of anywhere or what's your your place to go to get the purchase order number listing but yeah, I think I'm just going to do an inventory post real quick on my site and create an order and see if it shows up in that list, but I kind of don't think it does.
Daniel Rotondi 24:12
Yeah, know, I know in my testing earlier, I had done a few purchase orders and I'm not seeing them show up on this DataGrid here. No, I had done one under five and under one.
Zach Malloch 24:44
Yeah, I've Yeah, that is probably MainTrac side of
Seth Warren 24:50
things. It is I just I'm sorry, Zack. Yeah, I just confirmed it. It's like if I go into custom Screen design for management, Screen management and bring up the Purchase Order Management Screen. It's all MainTrac fields. So that's that's my bad I, I did go in and update the answer to the question just pointing towards report output listing and then inventory posting report. So I'm sorry for the confusion on my part.
Zach Malloch 25:12
That's appreciated. I mean, I was asking questions, I think is useful to kind of show the process, we go about kind of finding out what the answer is to.
Seth Warren 25:20
Oh, for sure.
Zach Malloch 25:21
Yeah. Thanks to Gary for asking that question. And that's what Seth was referring to, if you go to the answered questions in the q&a area, you can see the response there, pointing to the reports. That that is bringing us basically to the end of the session. And I wanted to give Seth, Dan and Brett the opportunity to add anything else. If there's any parting thoughts, we can certainly invite other questions. Otherwise, we'll we'll go ahead and wrap up after this.
Bret Alarcon 25:52
Well, I can think of one thing that usually Trips me up as when you know, you're doing your postings, and maybe you're just doing maybe receiving some nothing else. And then you're done. And then you Click on that little report Button at the bottom. Dan can actually Click on it. And let's see if anything pops up if we have any new stuff.
Daniel Rotondi 26:09
There we are
Bret Alarcon 26:16
preview document. So this is a for at least the fourth?
Daniel Rotondi 26:20
Oh, we had something there.
Zach Malloch 26:22
Right. It's because we ran the report it kinda Yeah,
Bret Alarcon 26:25
we got. Yeah,
Zach Malloch 26:27
it's almost like it's tracking everything that happens in between the times you run the reports. So when you run the report, after you're done with everything that you need to do, you'll get a report with each of the things you happen to do inventory posting and an order and receiving. So you have four pages to this report, then you ran it, it kind of clear that cache. So we don't have any more recent stuff than what we just last reported on. So we're giving you a blank. That's kind of how this this works.
Daniel Rotondi 26:54
Well put Zack I you can see here that I haven't clicked on that Button recently, as I do have a few others from from last year here that that displayed. But Brett, go ahead. Yeah. So
Bret Alarcon 27:09
what I wanted to say is this is at least a four page report. So each one of those pages in Dan's example is a different report. The first one being physical count, the second one being orders. I haven't ran this this report in a long time. But I remember in the past, like if you run the report, and I see you do have the preview, so you can see how many pages it is. But if you do a preview and your first page is blank, that doesn't mean the whole report is blank. That just might mean your physical count is blank. So sometimes I quickly run this report, I see physical count as blank. I was like, that's not what I'm expecting. But I really what I'm looking at is like, like a receiving page. Yeah. So I don't see that cousin. And I don't think the scroll down because the first page is blank. So if you see your first page is blank, that just means you didn't do any post orders. But if you scroll down, you would see like a post receipt once or something like that.
Zach Malloch 28:05
Good point to Yeah, check out the whole report if you do it. And then once again, like this is I like to think of the report Button on this as a really nice convenient feature. But if you really want to, like do anything historical and technically historicals anything after you've clicked on that report Button, yeah, go exactly where Dan is go to report output listing. Good like little hint is go based on the name of the page from your journal from the report from that main inventory posting Screen should match up. So like, you know, we have the inventory posting journal, you do the inventory posting report to get that you have the physical account, you go to the physical account worksheet to check that out. So yeah, hopefully that helps everybody out. And I don't see any new questions. Very good parting thought from Bret, anything, Seth or Dan, any last thoughts?
Seth Warren 29:02
I guess the only thing I would add, you know, and I think Dan already reiterated this, but like so many other aspects of RecTrac You know, inventory posting, it's kind of like, what you put in is what you can get out of it, you know, if you, you know, if you just sell inventory items, and don't use the all the management tools that are available to you, that's fine, you can still operate in RecTrac. But from like a level of assessment, like it's kind of hard to be able to truly get down to what those true numbers look like, from RecTrac You know, you're only using maybe 30% of what you could be using it for, you know, and then if you're partway through your season, and you don't, you know, if you start doing it now, that's fine going forward, you know, but like it doesn't necessarily capture you know, any of those changes that you've made in the past without having to go in so just, you know, if it's something that you're curious about, you know, or want to expand on doing, you know, identify you know, a good start to a season that you sell inventory items if it is seasonally You know, and then you know, make sure all your accounts are accurate. And then you know, just and then take advantage of all the information you get from it. And you know, and then you might end up finding that it helps you better accurately, you know, price items, see what items are popular versus which ones aren't. And then, you know, if you are seeing any kind of loss, you know, in any way, shape or form, then you'll be better able to track that through this as well.
Daniel Rotondi 30:25
A well said, Zach, Sorry Seth
Seth Warren 30:30
no worries,
Daniel Rotondi 30:31
I did just want to touch on one last thing, I recalled that along those lines of being able to, you know, capture that data and more accurately, maybe price your inventory. You know, once you have that kind of last cost in here, you'll see that last paragraph, fees for this inventory item can be based on a markup or a profit margin, from this value. So you actually do have a fee Type of last cost equals margin, or last cost equals markup. So you can actually have the fee be kind of dynamically priced, you know, at a specific markup or specific margin, you know, based off that last cost, which is yet again, another feature that you'd be missing out on, if you weren't utilizing this fully, I did just want to again, because I just leaned on it a little bit here for this Field. But I do just want to plug that that in app help is super useful, especially with this stuff. So you can always Toggle it on here from the support menu. Again, when you're in inventory posting, Click on the icon right next to it to get the full run instructions for each of these individual posting options that we covered today. And, again, that in app help is great for these Unit of Measure options here, because I find that that's usually a pain point for some people, especially when they're posting a lot of inventory all at once. They usually get tripped up on on, you know what, what's a sell unit, what's an inventory unit, what's a purchase purchase unit. And then again, on that Screen where I said you have the option of, of entering either sell units or purchase units, but you usually don't need to do both is is again, usually something that confuses people. So just be aware, be comfortable with those units of measure, and use the in app help. If you ever get stuck or tripped up. And if you can't figure it out, then you can always submit a case and maybe myself or Seth will will help you out in the future.
Zach Malloch 32:35
Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you very much, Dan, for joining us and for presenting so very well on this topic. Thanks Seth and Bret for being in the sidelines and helping out making all this goes super smoothly. And yeah, I think that we're going to take this in. So thanks for all the participants, of course, as well. Bret, I think we're ready to take it out if you're ready to take us out. You can you're muted.
Daniel Rotondi 33:04
Thank you, everybody.
Bret Alarcon 33:05
Thank you.
Seth Warren 33:06
Thanks, everyone.