Inventory management is one of the most important aspects of any business. By definition, it is a complete list of merchandise/works-in-progress, raw materials, finished goods on hand, etc., made each year by a business concern. There are three parts to inventory control: adding inventory, tracking inventory, and selling inventory. In this section, we’ll focus mainly on adding and tracking inventory.
Step-by-step guide
1. Go to Operations > Inventory > Inventory.
2. Click on the Add button at the top if the Inventory screen.
3. Depending on the inventory type being added to the Type of Product field, different fields will need to be addressed. For this example, we will add a standard inventory product.
4. Other fields can be filled in as well, including the following:
- Vendor's Product ID: This field is reserved for the Product ID number you use when you (re)order from the Vendor / Supplier.
- Picture: Here you can attach a picture to the product by entering the path of the picture file.
- Department: This is where you attach an item to a department to help organize your inventory.
- PLU (Product Look Up): This is an automatically generated sequential number used for Inventory tracking and counting.
- Barcode: In this field you can either enter the existing barcode (if your products come pre-barcoded) or leave it blank if you are using a dedicated label printer to print labels out from ACE 3000 (they will be automatically created by the software).
- Cost: This is the buying price from the seller.
- Margin: The margin is calculated automatically (based on default settings). You can leave it blank if you know the Retail Price, or put it in for the Retail Price to be calculated.
- Price: This is the selling price of the product. If you enter the Margin, the Price will be calculated automatically based on cost. If you enter in the Price as well as the Cost, the Margin will be calculated.
- Note: Use this to add any special notes to the item.
- Quantity: This is the physical count of the item on hand. (This field is for Inventory Items only. For non-inventory Items, e.g. Miscellaneous, Services, etc., this field is changed to Sold).
- MIN/MAX: Use this field to produce an Automatic Re-Ordering report. They have to be set higher than a 0 value in order to use the function. Based on these settings, the software will create Automatic Purchase Orders (For review purposes) where you can edit ordering information before the actual order is sent to the supplier.
- Additional Information: Check this box for setting up Taxes, setting additional Search fields(Classifications, Authors for books, Titles for movies, Main Characters, etc.), and to set Maximum Discount and/or Labels (to print or not to print Labels for this item).
5. Once you have finished adding the information about the inventory product, click on Save.
6. You will be taken back to the Inventory screen, where your new inventory product will be added.
7. Click on Save and then Quit at the top of the screen to finish. You’ve just added an item to the inventory.