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How to Manage Your Inventory

Manage Inventory levels as you ship products to your customers and receive products from your manufacturers

Brenda Beckham avatar
Written by Brenda Beckham
Updated this week

An Overview of Inventory

Every combination of product, variation and size has a unique inventory level in Uphance. As you ship products to your customers and receive products from your manufacturers, inventory levels are updated accordingly, ensuring your inventory level stays accurate at all times. You can also keep track of them via the reporting interface.

One of the beauties of using Uphance as an inventory ERP solution is that it automatically tracks the production quantities required to cover your sales, as well as quantities awaiting delivery from your manufacturers. These quantities are available in your reports as well.

Updating Inventory

There are two ways to update your inventory:

  • Performing stocktakes

  • Creating a manual inventory adjustment

It's important to note stock levels will automatically update when you receive new products, ship out a product, or process a return.

That being said, here's how to preform stocktakes and manual inventory adjustment.

Performing Stocktakes

Performing stocktakes makes the whole process of updating your inventory quick and efficient.

To initiate inventory adjustment via stocktake, open product inventory, create a new stocktake, and scan the inventory as illustrated below:

Bear in mind that selecting brand and product categories during the stocktake process is optional.

We've discussed how to perform a stocktake in great detail in this article. Be sure to check it out.

Creating a Manual Inventory Adjustment

If you have a small number of adjustments to make and know the exact inventory you wish to add or remove, then creating a "manual adjustment" can be a better option.

For this method, you can manually adjust the inventory levels of a product either by adding or subtracting from the existing inventory quantity. To subtract, you'd have to input a negative value. For example, to reduce a product's inventory quantity by two, you would have to input -2.

Below is the process for performing manual inventory adjustment:

Adjusting Stock in Bulk

If you have hundreds of stocks you wish to adjust, doing so manually will take a lot of time. Plus, it's impractical.

Thankfully, Uphance gives you the option of adjusting stock in bulk, and there are two methods to do this: you either upload a stock level sheet or a stock adjustment sheet.

Method 1

Uploading a stock level sheet involves updating your inventory level by adding more stock. So for instance, if you previously had 10 units of a product and then uploaded a stock level sheet with 7 additional units of that product, the stock level would come out at 17.

To upload a stock-level sheet, simply navigate to Inventory Management >> Product Inventory once again. Then click the Actions button and select Upload Stock Levels.

Keep in mind that the inventory columns in the sheet are calculated as follows:

Available from stock = stock - committed

Available = (stock + awaiting) - committed

Method 2

The second method to adjust inventory in bulk is by uploading a stock adjustment sheet. Unlike method 1 which only involves adding new stock, for method 2 you'd be adding available stock and subtracting the unavailable ones from your stock level.

The process for uploading a stock adjustment sheet is the same as method 1, only this time you will have to select Upload Stock Adjustment.

Please note that for a smooth upload experience, all uploaded files should be in XLSX format and not CSV.

Stock Transfers

Besides adjusting stocks, you also have the option of transferring stock from one warehouse to another.  Please note that Multi-warehouse must be enabled under Settings for this feature.

To initiate a Stock transfer, click the Create button once again and select New stock transfer

Once you select Stock Transfers, you will be prompted to select the warehouse you want to pick products from and the one you want to send them to.

Click the Update manual stock adjustment button once you are done selecting your preferred warehouse.

Next, select the products you wish to push out and click the Add Products button when you finish.

Note: if you attempt to push out more product quantities from a warehouse than what's already available, Uphance will flag it off.

For instance, if warehouse A has 2 units of a product and you push out 3, Uphance will flag it red like so:

When you are done, click the Save Changes button. If you notice you made a mistake, click the pencil icon next to the row you want to adjust

If all goes well, click the Apply button.

Once you apply the changes, the stock transfer will appear in the Applied Stock Operations section.

To view all the changes you - or a member of your team - made, click the Change Log tab like so:

Viewing Your Inventory

Uphance lets you view your product inventory based on their SKU. To do so, navigate to Product Information >> SKU


Exporting/Importing Inventory Levels

In a typical stock-take scenario (where you wish to record and enter total quantities counted), it's likely that you'll want to use the import spreadsheet method to update inventory levels.

To get started, you'll most likely want to export a spreadsheet (containing current inventory quantities) that you will edit, save, and import back into Uphance. The spreadsheet will be in the correct format and contain all current product SKUs.

To download such a spreadsheet, take the following steps:

Step 1

Click the Actions button on the SKU page and select Download Excel. You can also download the file as CSV if you want.

Step 2

After downloading the CSV, modify and update it by adding all the needed information.

These are the columns within your spreadsheet that you can update.

  • product_identifier

  • product_name

  • season

  • category

  • sub_category

  • color

  • size

  • sku_#

  • ean_upc

  • textile_content

  • weight

  • weight_unit

  • tariff_code

  • mid_code

  • country_of_origin

  • intrastat_code

  • warehouse

  • warehouse_location

  • stock

Then save the file once you are done with the adjustment.

Step 3

After modifying the file, re-upload it by clicking Actions >> Upload EAN, UPC, SKU#. Upon clicking, Uphance will ask you to select a file you wish to upload. Select it and click the upload button.

As described in the "Manual Stock Adjustment" section, you can view the upload in the Manual Inventory Adjustment screen discussed earlier in this document as well as in the Change Log as discussed later in this document.  

In the Manual Inventory Adjustment screen, you will see the "type" as "Upload" for your transaction.  You can also use the Manual Inventory Adjustment screen to "Reverse" that transaction if you would like by selecting that item and clicking the Reverse button.  You can validate it is the same transaction because your file name will be listed just above the Warehouse.  

Error Handling

You might occasionally run into errors when importing stock levels. It looks something like this:

As you can see from the example, three items in the spreadsheet "failed" to upload.

Whenever you notice this, re-check the import file and be sure that line items with "zeros" are removed. Then retry the import.

Import History

Once you upload a file, you will be automatically redirected to the Spreadsheet import history page. From here, you can see which files were successfully completed and those that weren't.

In addition, you will get a notification at the top, right of the screen letting you know whether they passed or failed.  Click on the "bell" to see these notifications (Figure 12):

Inventory Change Log

You can view and track changes made to your inventory level via the Change Log interface. To launch this page, navigate to Inventory Management >> Product Inventory one more time.

Then click the Actions button and then View Change Log

Upon clicking, you will see this page:

You can enter Product Names, Product Identifiers or SKU #'s in the "search" box to filter your list by something specific you are looking for.

You can also use the "All Types", "All Warehouses" and "Date Range" filters in the top right corner to narrow down your selection of items you want to view.  "All Types" menu option filters include any type of inventory operational transaction activity that was performed for your organization such as:

  • Consignee Sale

  • Consignment

  • Bergen Reconciliation

  • Cancellation

  • Delivery

  • Inventory Import

  • Manual Adjustments

  • Received

  • Return

  • Sale

  • Shipment

  • Shopify Order

  • Stock Operation

  • Upload

  • Upload Reverse

  • WooCommerce Order

Exporting Product Inventory and Change Log

You can easily export your product inventory as CSV or Excel by navigating to Inventory Management >> Product Inventory. You also have the option of removing SKUs with zero quantities, that is products that aren't available, during the export process.

You can also export your Change Log as an Excel/CSV sheet to perform additional analytics using filters and pivot tables.

To do so, select View Change Log from Actions and then download it as Excel or CSV.

Next steps

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