Inventory > Keeping it Simple > Determining How to Enter Your Inventory Items

How much detail to include when setting up your inventory items really depends on your business. Ultimately you want to ask yourself what type of sales and inventory information you want to get out of the program. Also what level of effort you want to put into creating your inventory. Listed below are a few different ways to enter inventory items.

Detailed Stock Numbers. You might want some items to have very detailed information built into the stock number. This information can include the Vendor, the vendor's style number, the year, size, color, seam length, etc (i.e, VEN-STYLE-M-XL-05). Including this information in your stock numbers can make it easier to filter reports or perform inventory look-ups on the Sales Screen. For instance although RetailEdge tracks items by Vendor, Department and Class, you might want to be able to look up items by manufacturer as well. If you build your Stock Numbers to include a manufacturer code then when you look up an item by Stock Number, you can simply type in this code to find a list of items by this manufacturer.

Stock Numbers Matching Vendor's Numbers. You might want some items to have Stock Numbers that exactly match the style number or vendor/manufacturer's code for a particular item. This is sometimes the easiest way to enter a Stock Number. If a vendor barcodes their items with their item number, you can use these barcodes to scan these items and will not have to re-tag these items with a RetailEdge barcode label. This can be convenient for items that come pre-tagged with small labels. You should be careful here. If a manufacturer or vendor style number is not using UPCs (which should be unique), these item numbers might overlap with another vendor. Also, the vendor might not track the same information that you are interested in tracking. Their part numbers might track color (which can change from year to year requiring a new item number next year) when you don't want to track color. Or they might only track size when you want to also track color.

Price Point Items. If you carry a large amount of inexpensive items (beads, flies, etc.), you might want to create price point items (B10 for a $0.10 bead, etc.). You can still track inventory on these items but you won't have the reporting resolution that you would have if you created more detailed items.

Department Level Items. If you have a group of items that have similar margins but you are constantly changing the price of these items on the Sales Screen AND you don't care about tracking inventory quantities for these items, you can set up a single item of Stock Type Department SKU. When you sell Department SKU items, RetailEdge will track the item's sales quantities and calculate the item's costs with the Department's Average Margin. If you enter these items with $0.00 price in the inventory, RetailEdge will automatically ask you for a selling price on the Sales Screen. You can also use Department SKUs when initially setting up your business and phase them out as your inventory gets put into the system.