Offline Inventory & Main Inventory

Richard,

The main purpose for offline inventory is that it _can't_ be sold (it's broke, defective, recalled, committed to another purpose, etc). If its saleable, it shouldn't be offline.

What are you using it for?

I think you are using Off-line inventory for a purpose other than what was intended. Off-Line Items are not avaialble for sale - the classic example is an item that was returned damaged and is to be returned to the supplier for repair or replacement. You put the returned item in Off-Line inventory, then later you transfer it out of Off-Line Inventory to the Supplier. Off-Line inventory is not intended to indicate 'overstock' - it's intended to mark un-sellable inventory.

Ok, it appears I'm misusng offline inventory. What I'm trying to do is use it as my over-stock inventory. I over buy when the price is compelling but I can only put so many items on the floor. I have been moving the over stock to offline inventory so I at least know it exists. If I put it in main inventory, once we sold what was on the floor, we would never know we were out even though we have the items in our stock room.

Since offline & main inventories don't know about each others levels, I find we are reordering items which we have offline.

I need an extension of RMS which allows for the connection of a stock room inventory to the main floor inventory where the main inventory system will tell me to replenish it from either a PO or from the stock room inventory.

I know I'm not the first to need this. How do other RMS users accomplish this?

Thanks, Richard

"Jeff" wrote:

Retail Realm has one

Richard,

Yep, you're doing it wrong. ;-)

If you receive 100 and you have 100 on the floor already, your on-hand inventory should say 200. You are just keeping it in different places or Bin Locations, within your store and/or warehouse.

You have two ways of doing it.

Entering a bin location manually, you've got about 20 digits to type in the field on the Special tab of the item.. With the appropriate abbreviations , you could up store product in about 5 places. EW2 = East Wall, Section 2 or

5162D2 = Shelving Unit 5162, Shelf D, position 2 = right side or whatever scheme you decide.

Some retailers just put the bin location(s) where the product is located. Some try to put a bin location _and_ a quantity, then give up the quantity part after about a week as its too hard to keep up with.

Another option is an add-in. I'm sure there are others and one of these days MS will create a webpage for RMS add-ins that someone can find _and_ use effectively. Retail Realm has what they call Multi-Location that you might want to look at.

left hand side of the screen, click on their brochure.

Derek,

Make sure you offer these and your other suggestions to MS. CustomerSource | Suggestions in the lower left.

I encourage the rest of you to go through the list once a month and vote for what you need/want added to RMS and POS. They tell us the more votes it gets the more likely it will be added!

But be careful what you wish for. The more options, the more it may cost! ;-)

The more options the better. MS should offer them as somthing you buy if you need a feature. I'm keep finding things I need to do which are not in this system, and these things seem to be basic to the retail industry, such as the stock room concept.

As far as the vot> Derek,

After looking at Retail Realm, I see they have many extensions to RMS. What is your experience using their modules? If you install a module, will it hold you from upgrading RMS as RMS evolves? They are in the UK. How responsive are they? What kind of experience are outher users have w/ RR?

Thanks, Richard

"Jeff" wrote:

Richard,

One thing to remember is that RMS is a base package that does a _lot_ of stuff. They have made the program open to software developers to customize the package as the market needs them, that's why you see so many add-ins available. MS couldn't possibly create and keep up with the special needs and different requirements of thousands of types of retail stores. It wood be nice for MS to create a better way of finding these add-ins too. The creators of these add-ins need to contact MS to tell them about it too.

In your case, there are 2 schools of thought. The customer can't buy what they can't see, so if its stuck in a back room somewhere, it ain't moving. One of the other is that why pay for warehouse storage, let the disty/manufacturer do that. I don't know what you sell, but in this day of overnight shipping, customers will/can wait a day or two.

Yes, the voting system is need of a lot of help, but its all we've got right now. At least this one is still working, all suggestions were lost about 2 years ago and I'm not sure if they were ever found. Make a suggestion to fix the suggestion box! ;-) As far as focus groups, I have heard that MS does this. To what scale, I don't know. I do know that RMS resellers are contacted for input for future updates every so often.

But its like herding cats, everyone has a different priority than the other. I know, we use to create and market our own POS software. Getting hundreds of ideas and whittle them down to a dozen or so, every 3-6 months.

This newsgroup is for both paid and unpaid support customers. MS makes this distinction way more complicated that it really is.

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