Selecting Unit When Managing Stock Count or Making...

ndixon · ‎03-02-2023

It doesn't seem like this is an available feature right now. I brought it up to a square customer support person. It would be amazing if I could select a unit other than the default unit when I manage my stock count.

I have multiple units with different unit conversions on certain items. We are a liquor store that buys cases and breaks things up into different pack sizes. The best way I could find to handle this is to do custom units for the different pack sizes (6 packs, 4 packs, singles, etc.)

I have my default unit as a case. I'm just starting to use square so I'm entering in my inventory. If I have 4 bottles of wine it would be one third of a case of 12. I have to enter it as a repeating decimal and the single stock count ends up as 3.9999 instead of 4. If I could select the per item unit when changing my stock count I would get the exact number of units I have.

The other way around, I could set my default unit as the individual bottles or cans but sometimes the prices on the invoices don't divide well and I have run into something like 1.3333 repeating as a per unit price. When I go to enter them into a purchase order, the invoice amounts don't match up because you can't do perfect fractions with the decimal precision.

Another solution I have thought of that would solve this problem would be to allow users to enter a different unit than the default unit when making purchase orders and then enter the amount. For example I could enter the unit of a case which would be equal to 24 singles for $93.40 but have the default unit be singles. Currently, if I had the default unit be singles I wouldn't be able to hit $93.40 exactly because the unit price is 3.8916 repeating. If I could select the case unit on the purchase order I could have my invoices match my purchase orders in the system.

Candlestore · ‎03-03-2023

@ndixon ;

I run into the same situation with my cases of Tapers that I order and other types of items we resell in our store.

I just tried entering SKU for a case of one of my items and it asks me to create a new item on the PO. It does pull up the Single item but then the Pricing is off as mentioned by ndixon.

I second this Idea for POs buy Stock units and not just the single unit because of the rounding errors.

Keith
Owner
Pocono Candle

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ndixon · ‎03-07-2023

I figured out how to work around the weird decimal thing on the single item when using the case as the default unit. If you create a custom unit that has a precision of 1 instead of using the per item default unit it rounds to the nearest unit. If you had a case of 12 and had 4 items, you could enter 0.33333 of a custom 12 item case unit it would show 4 items if you had the custom single item unit selected for it. This way you can still hit the exact price on the POs by entering them as case units. It's not ideal but it works for what I need to do.

TwinkleToes · ‎06-09-2023

I am currently in process of converting my store from another POS system to Square and have run into the same issue while testing. I have products bought in bulk and broken down into selling units. For example, ribbon and elastic for pointe shoes are purchased in bolts and then broken down into selling units (25 per bolt).

While testing different configurations, I discovered that if the default is set up as the selling unit, then inventory can be adjusted by the selling unit but the PO cannot be created with the bulk SKU. If the default is set up as the bulk unit then the purchase order can be created correctly, but all inventory adjustments must be done in the bulk unit with decimal conversion. In both tests I used a precision of 1 and identified that there were 25 selling units per bolt. This seemed to help keep the inventory levels consistent during updates to the inventory values, but still resulted in the catch 22 situation. Adjustments made at the bulk level with manually calculated decimal values increases the potential for error.

For my store, the bulk variation will be set up as a SKU that cannot be purchased, which at least helps with visibility and selection during sales operations and prevents selling a bolt to a customer.

I agree that by offering UOM capability, all operational functionality should support it. Purchase orders and inventory adjustments should allow selection of the unit being used. This would allow me to create purchase orders for the bolts and make inventory adjustments by either the selling unit or purchasing unit.

PS. Thanks NDIXON for starting this thread. I just created my profile today and this is my first post in the seller community!

Patti
Owner
TwinkleToes Dance Store

ndixon · ‎06-19-2023

Ya it's a little bit of a bummer. I was setting the stock unit as the bulk custom unit at first but we just pivoted to using the default by item unit. It makes certain things a lot easier and less tedious. We just had to come to terms with our purchase orders not matching 100% with our invoices. We don't connect our quickbooks to square so this isn't a big deal.

In your case, if you wanted to do it this way, you would just set it by the per item unit and enter it in a quantity of 25 in your purchase order for a whole bolt. Not sure how much bolts cost but if they cost $12.57 per bolt this would make your purchase order off by $0.0028 per length sold. It only lets you put in up to a cent in the purchase order screen so you could only enter $0.50. It would make each bolt be off by $0.07.

Selecting Unit When Managing Stock Count or Making Purchase Orders