I apologize if this has been requested in the past. Couldn’t find it.
I have product01 under my Inventory Items. Say I have 8 in stock. I want to assign the individual eights elements a serial number. In practice, I would scan this in using a bar-code scanner. Nothing too fancy, I wouldn’t think? Then again, I’m not a dev.
That would be non-negotiable functionality for my needs. I would also need to be able to sort by serial number and receive the date it was purchased from the supplier, which supplier, that kinda stuff. Mostly for warranty purposes. Basic query.
Now, maybe a more advanced feature I’m going to request:
We all know product prices vary over time. If I purchase product01 with serial number 001 for $1, say I sell it to my customer for $2. A week later my price to purchase a part with serial number 002 is $2, and I have to sell it to my customer for $3 or $4 or 150% or something.
What I would want to do is use my barcode scanner to scan into invoices the part serial number instead of selecting the product. This is simply so I’m not relying on one field (Sale Price). Instead, maybe I could exchange Sale Price instead for a markup percentage or a flat addition in the edit menu of an individual inventory item. Then, I can scan the product’s serial number and manager will add the markup.
Then I won’t have to worry about profit margins anymore because customers always get a fair markup, and saves me time having to think about new totals.
Inventory module in Manager as it is now is when you deal with many items of the same type.
What you want is an inventory module where each item is tracked separately. You can possibly stretch inventory module in Manager to create each unit as separate inventory item.
That way if you go Inventory items tab, you can search for the unit by serial number and see where the unit has been purchased and who it was sold to (if it was sold)
By using custom fields, you can add new fields to capture more information regarding the unit.
Sold or written-off units can be marked as inactive inventory items so they no longer show in drop-down lists.
Automatic markup prices will be probably handled by upcoming “price levels” module.
I really couldn’t make a separate inventory item entry each time. That would be a bit to laborious. I would like something where product0 would be a class and each individual inventory quantity (product0 #1, product0 #2 …) would be an instance of that class. (Please excuse the elementary comp sci understanding … I’m not a dev of any caliber).
If you are selling high-priced items and sell only a few, then tracking by unit is OK. If you sell many, then it would be a lot more work to maintain.
Another option is to simply specify serial number in description when selling/buying items. This way you would be able to do full-text search to find out when and from who did you buy that particular unit and for how much.
In future, it will be possible to have groups under Inventory items tab but not sure if that will help you much since you would still need to have each unit created as an item which could be too much work to maintain.
Hi Team and once again the more I get into it, the more amazed I am on the simplicity of this solution.
An idea to support the use of serial numbers would be to create an option to enable serial # tracking.
This would require a separate table to capture details of the serial number. This table would basically require to have at minimum the following fields:
Serial#
Item code These 2 would be the key
Purchase Date
Purchase document#
Sell Date
Sale document#
Deactivated
If this is enabled, a new field in the respective documents where item is used would be activated to capture the serial number and thereby based on the document populate respective fields in the SERIAL# table.
In this way one can manage serial number tracking in the system.
