How to Use Square Inventory

Square inventory is a feature of the square point of sale software every Square POS includes inventory tracking even free subscriptions hi I'm Mary King one of the retail experts here at fit small business and today I will show you how Square inventory keeps small businesses organized in this video I'll cover bulk importing items adding individual items creating purchase orders and checking out your inventory reports so let's get started adding some inventory items the first step to adding inventory items is going to your Square online dashboard from your Square online dashboard you want to go to the items section and from there you have two main options for adding new items you can create individual items or you can import items in bulk from a spreadsheet or a DOT CSV file the fastest way to add items to your inventory is to bulk import them from a spreadsheet this is a great option if you're switching from an existing point of sale or if you already have a large on hand inventory if you're a new shop or you just prefer to handle all of the granular details for all of your items at once you might prefer to create individual items but we're going to start with bulk import the first thing you'll need to do is make sure the spreadsheet you import is formatted in exactly the way Square categorizes the information and square makes this really easy they provide a template right here that you can download from your item Library you just click that link and you can choose to export it into an Excel or a CSV file and just click export I've already done that so I'm going to move on to the next step which is clicking this import items button here and if by some chance you missed the download template button on the previous screen Square gives you another chance to download it here to make sure you don't miss it um I'm just going to find my file and add it and hit next on this screen square is double checking that it's understanding the information correctly so it's pulled the column names from the spreadsheet and it gives you a little preview of the information in that column to make sure that everything looks right so you've got your skus you've got your categories all of this looks right to me so I'm going to hit next and voila our inventory items are in our item Library I didn't have a huge inventory to upload so it didn't take a super long time but it's generally pretty quick so now let's add an individual item adding individual items is really easy you just navigate to your item library and hit create an item when you click create an item Square gives you the option to manually create the item or create an item by using a barcode scan you'll need a barcode scanner attached to your POs to barcode scan it generally just Auto populates some fields for you and then directs you to the main item page so you can add more details in the item page you can add a product name a category you can also add a detailed description and add an image if you have multiple locations you can choose which locations this is this product is available at and you can also add variations um like size and color so if we were to add variations for color here and then add a second option set for size Square would let us preview all of the different variations so we've just created eight variations of this one item in different sizes and colors so we're going to go ahead and accept that and square automatically generates skew numbers for all of them and if you have different prices for each of these items you can add them here you'll also see in this section here that you have options for stock to manage stock and edit stock tracking so in order to track your stock levels in real time you will need to turn on stock tracking so we can choose to track all of these items we can choose to track none of them we can choose to track just the blue throws or just the king size we're going to track all of these and we're also going to receive some stock so right now I've added the item but Square thinks I don't have any on hand so I'm going to add in we have stock and I can also add the unit cost so my cost tracking is accurate for reports we'll get to that later I can also toggle on this option here low stock alerts so I can say I want my Square POs to inform me when I'm down to three of these items and it will send me an email saying you're low on stock here your next option is to add modifiers modifiers are useful if you have variations that you don't want to appear on customer receipts and you don't want to track in inventory modifiers mostly come up in businesses that make things to order like furniture or crafts or in Food Service like restaurants and coffee shops if you aren't involved in those types of businesses you won't really use modifiers but just in case you have a use for them I'm going to quickly show you how to do it you do need to navigate away from the item you're creating in order to add a modifier set so ideally you would have your modifier set added before you're creating your new items but you add a modifier set by going to your item library and then clicking on modifiers then you want to click here on create a modifier set and we're going to add a monogram option we will add all of our options that customers can choose from here in the bottom you can add individual prices if these modifications increase the price of the item you can add images for reference if you like and you can also choose whether customers can add multiple or can only select one modifier so with this toggled on customers can only select one modifier so if this was something like a meat temperature you'd only want them to be able to select one but if it's something like building your own burger or selecting colors for an item that you're building for someone you might want to give them options to choose multiples we're only going to let them choose one and then you hit save and your modifier set is available but let's go back to our item we were adding so here we are so here we are back with our item we're going to add that monogram modifier as an option and we're almost done the next option is to create a custom attribute this is basically a custom field where you can store in any information that you want so a business that sells wine might want to store information like vintage or country of origin a bookstore might want to add literary genres using the custom attribute field allows you to more easily filter items and searches in reports but this is a completely optional field and you may not use it at all finally you can choose whether these modifiers and attributes show up on your point of sale so if you want you can have these modifiers and attributes show up at the bottom of your point of sale screen when your customers and your staff are ringing in sales or you can choose to not have them uh show up at the bottom of the screen and you would toggle that setting on or off here and then you can choose to make this item available online whether that's on your Square online online site or on a third-party platform with all of your selections made you want to hit save and your item is available now let's take a look at some newer Advanced features like creating purchase orders this requires a plus level subscription which is currently sixty dollars per month but you can test drive the plus level for free for 30 days which is what I'm doing um so to add a purchase order you want to start from your item menu scroll down to inventory management here on the left and then choose purchase orders then you click this big blue button to create a purchase order and follow the prompts you can add your vendor and if you want to add additional information you can edit the vendor here you can add all of their their address you can add your reps name you can add an email address and an account number then if you have from multiple locations you'll choose which location to send these items to you'll choose an expected delivery date and if you want to add custom notes you certainly can this is a good place to include notes like um who will be receiving the delivery who the delivery driver should ask for if they need to deliver to a specific site part of your business like if you have a loading dock or something like that then to add items you can just start typing in an item name or a SKU and it will pull it up from your inventory or if it's a new item you can create a new item you want to add your quantity add the cost and it will generate all the rest of the information then you have the option to save as a draft or create the purchase order you can also create purchase orders in the POS app on your phone or POS device you just go to inventory click purchase orders and then create purchase order you can create vendors or add existing vendors and you can add items by barcode scanning or by searching through your inventory you add items click continue add your quantity and then you'll be prompted to confirm that the information is correct your prices haven't changed hit continue make sure everything looks right and then click create you can also receive purchase orders from your uh from the same screen once you have existing purchase orders if you have a delivery you can then receive those items right from your POS app and those will be automatically added to your inventory and update the quantities on hand in addition to these features you can also print barcode labels directly from your Square inventory dashboard even for items that are brand new and you just received you go to your item library and then you scroll over here to the right hand side this actions tab where you can do a lot of things but we're going to scroll down to print labels here you can select your label type there's all sorts of options that are pre-loaded depending on the type of printer you have you can choose your barcode format and then you add items and you can even select items by category so we're going to print all of our apparel labels right now and we're going to create labels you can print them or you can just save them as a PDF if you need to send them somewhere else and then just click print and you're ready to go I know it feels like we spent a lot of time on administrative tasks but all of this administrative work has a purpose it makes pulling your reports really quick and easy so let's take a look at some of these really useful Square inventory reports you access your reports from the main menu here on the left scroll down to reports and then scroll down to inventory reports here you'll you'll be able to see cost of goods sold vendor sales projected profit inventory by category and inventory sell through I'm not going to go through all of these but I will show you some really cool features the first one is cost of goods sold this report will tell you how much you're spending for the sales you're making and give you a very quick at a glance profit margin figure this report is most accurate if you have added all of your unit costs I haven't done that in here for all of my items so my profit margin isn't really accurate but it does look amazing um then I also want to show you your vendor sales you can see which of your vendors are top performers for you uh projected profit and inventory by category are pretty self-explanatory but you also have this inventory sell through report which is incredibly useful it shows you the rate you're selling through your items you can see which items are the most popular you'll be able to see your quantity on hand how many you've sold and your sales velocity how quickly you're selling these items then this report will also predict when you're expected to go out of stock on something so looking at this report I can see that this banana necklace really popular we are predicted to be out of stock in 29 days I'll be able to see if I have any on order which I don't and from this report I can choose to order more and create a purchase order directly from that report and that's how Square makes it really quick and easy to manage your inventory if you've used square to manage your inventory or if you have questions about using Square inventory let us know down in the comments and for more content like this subscribe to our YouTube channel thanks for watching and until next time happy selling

Channel: FitSmallBusiness

Views: 11,429

Keywords: how to use square inventory, square inventory, how to use square, square

Id: bD-6JfihCjQ

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023