Time Stamps in Physical Inventories

Hi,

We have a PSC Falcon 340 device and we'd like to use it in taking physical inventories.

The device uploads the scanned entries to the host computer, as a CSV file. The problem that I'm facing is that for every scanned entry, the Date and Time stamps are maintained in two separate fields (separated by a comma), and I haven't managed to make RMS read the 4th (Time) field.

I would very much like to use the Time stamp, as it would potentially allow you to run physical inventories without having to shut down the store or a department.

Any suggestions as to how I can import the Time field, short of manually removing the commas?

Thanks,

Oh man... please disregard the second post...

Thanks

Oh no, the second post was just a repeat of the original one. :)

But regarding the Time stamp, RMS does handle it. When I manually removed the comma between Date and Time, it did pull it in.

That can be used to potentially reconcile a difference between the physical count and the Expected Qty, based on the time the sale was made.

There might be a formatting issue, but it's worth a try...

1.)Open up the .csv file and insert another column. 2.)Combine the date cell with the time cell using the formula "CONCATENATE". 3.)If that works, you'll need to insert yet another column and copy and past the conents of the "CONCATENATE" cells into the new column using the paste special->values. 4.)Then delete the date, time, and calculated CONCATENATE columns. You should be left with 3 columns I believe. 5.)Save the file as a .csv file

This is all assuming that the concatenate works.

Just a thought/suggestion for you to try.

Michael Behm

Why, did you figure it out? :)

I was going to say that I don't think the Physical Inventory feature can handle Times, just Dates.

I wanted to share my findings with the group regarding the Time stamp issue, as it seems to be a rather rare and ambiguous subject.

As it turns out, the time stamp is quite a useful feature and RMS fully supports it. The main benefit is that it allows the store or a particular department to remain open and make sales, while the physical inventory is being taken.

Consider the following scenario: At 8:00 am you run your new Physical Inventory Count sheet. At 8:15 you scan item Z with a quantity of 8. At 8:30 you sell 2 of item Z off the shelf. At 9:00 you upload the counted items into a file and import that into your Physical Inventory Count sheet, and clicck Calculate

If your count entries have been stamped with the scan time and properly imported, RMS will know that the count was taken before the sales were made, and therefore adjust the Expected Qty to 8. No discrepancy!

If your count entries have not been time stamped, or stamped with a time after the sale, or if you manually enter the count value, RMS will not adjust for the sold items and will compare the count value with an Expected Qty of 6. Discrepancy of -2.

I for one am very pleasantly surprised by how sophisticated RMS is in dealing with physical inventories.

Hope this was of use to anybody might have had questions on this issue.

The software that comes with the Falcon is supposed to be programmable, so it should be possible to change the date/time format to load asa single value. I just got a test unit, but haven't had a chance to play with it yet.

Depending on how many rows you need to edit, it may be easier to us a formula in Excel to concatenate the Date and Time.