Chapter 16. Inventory
Prism 1.14.7 User's Guide Chapter 16. Inventory PDF
Prism 2.3 User's Guide Chapter 16. Inventory PDF
Inventory Overview
Prism's Inventory area helps you track, find, add, edit, and group your merchandise in a convenient and efficient manner. Inventory can contain up to 999,999 unique items. Instead of adding items one by one, retailers frequently group merchandise into families of related items, called styles. Prism's Inventory area enables you to view and work with Inventory as Item Details or Style Details and easily switch between them.
- Items can be tracked by UPC or ALU and individual units or groups can be tracked by Serial Number and/or Lot Number.
- Assign a Department and Vendor to items. Departments enable you to group items logically (e.g. "Men's Pants"), or by physical location (e.g. "Register Area"). Assigning a Vendor Code to items enables Prism to track vendor performance as merchandise is ordered, received, transferred, and sold.
- Several Description fields are available. Description 1 is considered the primary description field. Description 2 to Description 4 fields are available for adding more information, if needed. A Long Description field stores descriptions up to 2,000 characters long.
Prism includes powerful pricing tools:
- Price Levels: Each price level represents a complete set of inventory prices. Useful for things like separate prices for VIPs, Employees, etc.
- Price Rounding and Adjusting: Fine tune prices to always end in a certain value (e.g. .99)
- Price Manager: Adjust the prices of a group of items by a certain amount or percentage.
- Max Discount Percentage: Limit the percentage of an item's price that can be discounted.
- Various Cost-related preferences and fields (e.g., Order Cost) give retailers flexibility in controlling and tracking item cost.
Here are some questions regarding Inventory Management to consider when configuring Prism:
Does Merchandise Arrive at Store Pre-Tagged, or Does Store Print Tags?
If merchandise tags need to be printed at individual stores, you can create the tag designs using Document Designer. You can then assign a default tag design to individual items. Note: You can also assign a tag design to an entire department. This is useful for items such as jewelry, which have smaller tags than other items.
Does All Merchandise Have a UPC?
UPC is the standard method for tracking inventory items in Prism. You can enter the UPC for individual items.
How is Merchandise Tracked? By Item? By Style? By Serial/Lot Number?
Prism makes it easy to track inventory using a variety of methods.
You can simply import/create a list of individual items. You can also group related items into styles. A style is a group of inventory items that possess similar characteristics, but vary in size, color, or some other attribute. For example, a sweater that is sold in four sizes and two colors comprises a style of eight items. For items such as cellular phones and bicycles, you can track items by serial number. For items such as pharmaceuticals, you can track items by lot number, including expiration dates.
What type of Style Descriptions Are Used?
Prism provides four description fields for each item (Description 1-4). When using styles, you can select which description field to use for the style description: Description 1, Description 2, or Both.
Are Alternate Lookups Used?
Some retailers use a different tracking system than UPC. These alternative identifiers can be entered in each item's ALU (Alternate Lookup) field. You can optionally copy the description information in an item's Description 2 field to the ALU field.
User-Defined (Custom) Fields Needed?
Prism provides up to 14 user-defined fields in which you can store custom information. One of the fields is a date field, the rest are text fields.
What Tax Codes Are Assigned to Items?
You define each of the tax codes that are required by your tax jurisdiction in Admin Console > Preferences & Settings > Node Preferences > Taxes. You can then assign any of these tax codes to items.
Inventory Quantity Considerations
Each item in Inventory has a Store OH Qty field that stores the number of units in Inventory. The OH Qty value is updated by various documents as those documents are processed in at the POA. Sale transactions decrease OH Qty while return transactions increase OH Qty. Receiving vouchers increase OH Qty. Return vouchers decrease OH Qty. Transfer Slips decrease the OH Qty at the source store. A transfer voucher increases the OH Qty at the destination store. A quantity adjustment memo can increase or decrease OH Qty depending on whether the Adj Qty is more an less than the current OH Qty.
In addition, updating a Physical Inventory sheet will update the OH Qty of items on the sheet.
Min Qty and Max Qty
Each item can be assigned a Min Qty that represents the minimum desired stock level and a Max Qty that represents the maximum desired stock level.
On the Qty tab of the Item record, you can view key quantity values, including: Rcvd Qty, Sold Qty, On Ord Qty, Min Qty, Max Qty, SO Ord Qty, PO Ord Qty, PO Rcv Qty, SO Snt Qty, TO Snt Qty In, TO Sent Qty Out, TO Ord Qty Out, TO Ord Qty In, Trans. In Qty, Trans. Out Qty, ASN In Qty
Update OH Qty using Adjustment Memos
You can create a quantity adjustment memo to increase or decrease OH Qty.
Inventory Cost Considerations
Preferences that can influence Cost
The two preferences below and their functions are important with regards to understanding how they might influence inventory cost. They are both found in Admin Console > Node Preferences > Purchasing.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Cost to use for POs and Voucher | This is simply the pre-populated cost in the Cost field on a new voucher. Inventory cost: For any Voucher or PO, the ‘Cost' field will display the Inventory cost. Order cost: For any Voucher or PO, the ‘Cost' field will display the Order cost. Order Cost: The ‘order cost' value is initially populated from Inventory cost (when an item is new). After that, it displays the ‘cost' value of the last PO/Voucher |
| Inventory costing method | The mechanism used to value the company inventory The ‘Cost' field on POs/Vouchers can affect cost of an inventory item if that cost is different than the current inventory cost. Options are: ‘Leave' - Do not let a different cost on a PO or Voucher affect the inventory cost ‘Overwrite' - Overwrite the Inventory Cost with the Cost on the PO/Voucher ‘Average' - Modify the inventory cost to be an average between the current inventory cost and the PO/Voucher cost. Calculation for Inventory Costing Method ‘Average' The basic calculation is: InvnC$ = [(invnC$ * InvnQty) + (VouC$ * VouQty)] / [InvnQty + VouQty] Example: Inventory Item 555 has a qty of 5 and a current inventory price of $5. On a new voucher, we are receiving a qty of 10 with a new cost of $4.75. Our new Inventory cost (InvnC$) for item 555 will be: [($5 * 5) + ($4.75 * 10)] / [5 + 10] => [$25 + $47.50] \ 15 => 72.50 / 15 = $4.83 Had the Inventory Costing Method in the above example been ‘Overwrite', the new Cost$ would simply have been $4.75. |
Inventory Views
Users can manage inventory on a store-by-store basis. Users can view inventory as a list of items of view detailed info about a single item. Users can add new items, deactivate existing items, and change key item information.
When you first access the Inventory area by default, you are in "Item Lookup" and the search filters will be applied to searching for items. You will see:
- A list of inventory items
- A search area for filtering the inventory list
If you click Search without entering any filter criteria, the entire inventory list is shown (list view). The columns in the results grid can be customized by changing grid formats preferences for Inventory Lookup (Admin Console > Node Preferences > Grid Formats).
The list can be filtered by department, vendor, description, price range, or by a specific item identifier (UPC, ALU, Serial, Lot). Select the desired search field in the "Search By" dropdown and then enter criteria before clicking Search. When you find the desired item, click the check mark on the left side of the row and then click Item Details button to view the item record in form view.
If you want to search for a style or styles, click the Style Lookup button.
Sample Inventory Search screen:
