I made inactive an inventory item that I don’t plan on buying in the future. However, I did not realise that I still had stock on hand for this product. While I want the inventory item to be made inactive, it should not affect the inventory on hand on the Summary Page where I had an outstanding balance of £30 but nothing was shown because the item was inactive.
Can you please clarify your issue? Are you saying that the value of the inactive item is not included in Inventory on hand? Is the value there but the item is not? Or what?
As a note, making an item inactive only moves it to the bottom of lists, grays it out, and takes it off dropdown menus. If it still has value, that should not change.
Go to Summary Page, click on Inventory On Hand. That’s the part of Manager that I am looking at. I have worked out that if you change the view from 50 to the largest number, you will eventually find the product with the £30 far far down in a long list of inactive products.
On the default page view of 50, you just see the amount £30 at the bottom, it does not show the item even if everything else is a zero value.
This is not obvious or intuitive as the default should be to show any items with a value first then items with a value of zero as this is the way the developer designed that view to allow people to see what inventory is actually on hand as it were. I actually exported the whole view into excel to see if I could find this particular transaction and that’s when I realised that the item was inactive. But it’s not easy to pick that up unless you know that you are looking for an inactive item which in the normal way would not happen and also from a visual point of view not that easy to find because it’s greyed out.
I don’t think that you should be able to make an inventory item inactive if it has a quantity. You should have to either sell or write off that inventory quantity first. Once an item is made inactive you cannot do anything with the quantity in stock - you can’t write it off, sell the goods or do anything with it until you re-activate the product.
Yes, as designed. The total at the bottom is the total for the control account, Inventory on hand. That does not change whether your inventory list is one or 100 pages long. The figure is not a subtotal of what shows on the page.
That may be your preference. But the design is to show active items in declining order of value, then inactive items. The point of adding the ability to designate items as inactive was to clear them from the top of lists, menus, etc. so users would not have to scroll past them.
Why? Think of a business selling seasonal merchandise. Advertising and customer support is adjusted to match. Possibly the business even shifts warehouse operations to different locations based on the season. So during the winter, summer merchandise is made inactive and vice versa so sales personnel do not have to deal with items that are not currently on offer. That would not necessarily mean the business wanted to get rid of its off-season merchandise. It can all be brought out again next year and Batch Update can be used to switch the Active/Inactive status based on a custom field listing the season during which the merchandise will be offered. Sales personnel could, in fact, tell customers the item was not presently available, but that it would be at a certain date.
I find the ability to inactivate inventory items very useful especially if they have quantities.
My use case is to disable manual entries for items sold only as a kit. The kit will work just fine and you can still make purchases by cloning a purchase invoice or copying a purchase order. And to create a write-off/on I use batch create.
It’s a bit of work for the admin staff but it’s worth it since avoids a lot of data entry mistakes, especially since we have no other method to restrict the drop-down items used in manual entry fields.
Another reason is just to disable an item temporarily for one reason or another as my friend @Tut just pointed out.
Although I see how this might be a problem to @dalacor, but I have to respectfully object to the proposal.
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Very creative, @Ealfardan. I had not thought about that. But it would be very useful in situations where goods and their packing materials are bought from different suppliers yet always sold together.
Noted that many people make inventory items inactive to re-activate later. I understand the logic of showing active items with value first, then zero values, then inactive items with value and then zero inactive.
Regardless, I think there needs to be a better way for a user to be able to see what that £30 is as I ended up having to export the whole table to find the transaction. You don’t have to change anything in that table if people could click on that total at the bottom to see what transactions are included in that amount.
I have no use for inactive items that still have quantities and the item was made inactive without addressing the quantities. It is actually quite hard to find the errant transaction if you have 10 pages of inventory items, most inactive. There just needs to be a better way for people to find where that £30 is coming from especially if you never normally make inventory with quantities inactive as it’s not easy to find.
Sure, I think that marking inactive items as such and placing them at the bottom of the list in the Inventory tab makes complete sense. However, that shouldn’t be the case in financial reports including the summary page.
Inventory items are not shown on any financial reports (balance sheet, P&L, cash flow statement, statement of changes in equity, or the Summary). So that does not seem relevant.
From an accounting perspective, there is no “errant transaction.” You are referring to the balance of an inventory item’s subsidiary ledger. You had inventory on hand; it had a value; and the program properly included it in the total of Inventory on hand. Looking at the total for Inventory on hand, that number will include all inventory items. So you are not looking for a “transaction.”
If you somehow determined that your Inventory on hand balance was off by £30 (though I don’t know how you would have done that), you could use the Sort or Search features to find items with £30 balances.
I did. This is what the problem is. The sort doesn’t sort amounts in order. I saw that I had £30 by looking at inventory on hand on the summary page. It says £30 there. I didn’t think to use find, the sort should work as that is how most programs sort feature works.
Manager’s sorting is adaptive to the context, with multiple criteria. In this case, active and inactive is the primary sort criterion, then value.
That’s the problem. Not every user knows that. Hence my topic.