How to track the stock of items that I receive in a box?

[Fer]

I receive items packed in a box, and from that box i sell the items by units or in smaller proportions, is there a way to handle this?

[Rodrigo Díaz]

You can create an item “box” and another one for your unitary item.

- Item box
- Item unit

The item unit will be composed of the itme box, which allows you to share the same stock for both items.

 

The downsides.

- It works only if you order products always by the same standards. For esample, ordering a box of bananas that is always 40 lbs. 
- It takes more initial preparation.

The benefits

- Once it’s set up it doesn’t require changes.
- It streamlines the creation of Purchase orders.

 

How to do it?

First Step: Creating item box.

Indicate in the item’s name your unit of measure. In my example I write "Bananas Box (40lbs)"; and give it a cost.

Enable Track Stock, and enter a stock value.

Note that the sotck means how many boxes you have in inventory.

1 unit in stock equals 1 box in inventory, which means 40lbs of bananas.
2 units in stock = 2 boxes = 80 lbs

You can now also specify a low stock and an optimal stock value. This will help later to create a purchase order.

In my case I will also enter a supplier and a default purchase cost.

 

Second step: Creating Unit Item.

In this case, I will indicate in the item name my unit of measure, which will be 1 lbs.

I enter the sales price, but I leave the cost field empty. In my example I sell this item by weight.

We are not going to track stock.
Instead, we activate “Composite item”

In the component search, add the item “Bananas Box”
And enter 0.025 in the quantity column.

The unit cost will be automatically calculated. (0.75 as shown in the image above)

The formula for the quantity I used is 1*1/40

It comes after considering that 40 (lbs) makes 1 box. So we need to calulate how many boxes makes 1 (lbs).
1 lbs makes 0.025 boxes.

After that, we only need to save the changes.

 

Next: Selling items

Now, I head to the POS and proceed to make a sale of Banana x 1.200

Stock of item box is reduced the respective units. Which should be 1.2 * 0.025 = 0.03
The result is that I have 4.97 units in stock

 

Next: Creating new Purchase Order

Let’s say the stock of the box drops down to 0.5 units.
Now I want to make a Purchase Order.

Quantity and Purchase cost are automatically filled based on my current stock level and the Low and Optimal stock.

Probably it’s not convenient to order 4.5 boxes, but rather, 5 new boxes.
And this time, my supplier is giving me a better price of $28 per box. So I will manually change the values.

The goods arrive to store so I mark the order as received.

I check the item and confirm that the stock is updated:

And I can see how average cost has also been updated

The cost of the unit item also gets updated accordingly.

The formula of how the new average cost is calculated is the following:

 

 

That's all!

[scoop]

Thanks for that workaround, which is helpful for us looking at similar solutions at the moment. It is almost the perfect solution! We were going to do it the other way around, but you couldn't add a supplier to composite items, rendering it useless for our purposes (as it wouldn't be able to auto populate the PO list). We buy a lot of items in packs, boxes, etc and sell in units (weight or item). The problem with the above would be that you would then need each item on their own on the POS, which would make the POS with 500 plus items very difficult to navigate. At the moment we have them all as variants under different categories, which works for the POS, but creates issues as different variants can't have different suppliers and due to the way we order in larger amounts, or pack sizes (which is why we are looking for a solution). Any idea how to solve this?

Essentially we want our PO list to populate with the low stock notifications of the pack/box sizes we order, but need to sell the units in groups as variants to keep it manageable at the other end. This is the one area I think Loyverse is lacking. At everything else it is incredible.

Thanks,

Kaspar

[scoop]

I'm guessing we may need to look at reconfiguring our POS to make this work, making more use of tabs to avoid too much scrolling.

[Amrish]

What I do to help simplify/organize the SKU numbers is assign a digit for the SKU number to identify if the items is by box or single.

So using the example above:

101070 for Banana (40lbs) - I added a "0" to the end of the code.

101071 for Banana (1lb) - I end the code with "1" to indicate the retail.

Or you can use some variation to this that suites your needs. For example using:

- assigning the first digit(s) as the identifier or

- using a letter as an identifier or

- using the number of units in a box as the identifier (1010740 for the Banana 40 lbs; and 1010701 for the Banana 1lb)