Inventory Management (Add, Audit, and Remove)

This article describes how to use the various scan types, what each does, and when you should use them.

Before we jump into our explanation, we want to review a couple of things:

Firstly, your inventory consists of two groups, Active and Archived Inventory.

Active Inventory

Active inventory has two statuses, Verified and Absent.

• Verified items are any tagged items scanned into the system since the last audit. Scanning any tag will move it to the verified list.
• Absent items are unscanned tagged items since the last audit. Uploading an audit scan will move all unscanned tags to the absent list.

Archived Inventory

Removing items from the active inventory will transfer those items to the archive list.

RFID Serialization

Each RFID label has a unique serial number, and items scanned at a new location are automatically removed from the previous location's inventory. Auto-transfer is an automatic process recorded on the Scan Sessions page.

This same serialization makes possible all of the inventory scanning processes which we will now cover. 

J's Slippers

To help us illustrate how these processes work, we will use a fictional example, retailer J's Slippers. J's sells high-quality leather slippers online and in two physical stores to customers in Canada and the US.

Their inventory is a flow of various styles, sizes, and colors, with products continually being sold and new stock added to their inventory. 

Add Scan

As stock enters their warehouse and stores, they immediately perform an Add scan to add the items into their inventory. Any items scanned at another location will be removed from that location and added to the new location.

There are three available Add scan types: Add new, absent, and include verified, which allow the user to do the following:  

• Add New - Scan only new items not already in that location's inventory.
• Add Absent - Scan only items which are "Absent." These items were in the inventory before the last audit but have not been scanned since.
• Include Verified - Includes items already in the verified inventory. Once new and absent items are scanned and uploaded, they appear as verified items.
• Restore Archived - Scan only tags that are in archived status.

Auditing

The speed of scanning with RFID makes it easy to add to inventory, but how do you manage the items leaving the inventory? Perform a remove scan each time items leave. What if that's not possible? The answer is auditing!

How to Audit

Auditing sets a date and time from which inventory must be Verified. All items in Verified inventory will be moved into an Absent status, and will no longer be counted towards your total.

After you start your Audit within the mobile app, a scan will start automatically to begin re-verifying tags. Any tags that you scan will be moved from Absent to Verified, and any tags that are not scanned (presumably, items that have left your inventory) will remain in Absent. This effectively gives you a fresh inventory count without any items lingering from previous scans.

Use Case

We will examine one slipper, The "Slide," to help clarify this process.

Since J's does not remove items as they leave their inventory, they use the audit to remove these sold items, and have determined that a weekly audit would give them an excellent window to analyze their inventory change.

Below are the inventory numbers for the Slide at the end of the audit completed on 1/7.

During the following week, they added new stock of this style, as well as sold the item online and in their stores:

They performed an audit to identify and record the changes made to their inventory. The following week's audit on 1/14 identified:

Managing the Absent List

Regularly reviewing and clearing the absent list will help track the outward flow of items from verified to archived.

Removing Items

The remove scan captures the serial numbers of the items scanned and moves them to the Archived list. The Remove scan option can be an excellent option for grouped items before shipping, and users can scan and compare what is shipping against the order total.

Archived Inventory

Restore Archived - Archived items are no longer considered Active inventory and cannot be scanned using the standard methods of Add New/Absent/Verified. To restore Archived items to active inventory, a user must choose the Restore Archived scan option to scan and upload the items. Once restored to active inventory status, they can be scanned using the Active methods.

To learn more about how auditing actually works in practice, continue by watching this short video