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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 over a week ago

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

The normal workflow for increasing your inventory is to create, confirm and "receive" a production order. In some cases, you'll want to set or adjust inventory levels manually. You can do this in one of the following ways:

  • Creating a manual inventory adjustment.

  • Exporting/importing a spreadsheet of inventory levels.

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" record is the quickest way to update inventory levels.

Here are the steps to go about it:

Step 1:

Log in to your account, navigate to Inventory Management >> Product Inventory

Step 2:

Click the Actions button and select Inventory Adjustments

Step 3:

Upon clicking Inventory Adjustments, you will be automatically redirected to the drafts adjustment page. There, click the Create button and then select New manual adjustment

Step 4:

Clicking the New manual adjustments button will fire up the product selection page. Here, select the products you want to adjust the inventory level. Be sure to add the product quantities and sizes. When you are done selecting, click the Add Products button.

Step 5:

After selecting products and clicking the add product button, you will see the Manual adjustment interface where you can change your product quantities.

Here you will see the Old/New inventory levels of a product. To add more product quantities, input a value greater than 0. For example, if a product's old inventory level was at 0, input 5 to increase it to 5.

To reduce inventory level, input a negative value which isn't more than the Old quantity.

For instance, if the old quantity is 42 and you want to reduce it by 7, input -7. Note that if you input -43, you will encounter a system error.

After adjusting the inventory levels, you can add a note stating the reason for the adjustment. You can also select the warehouse you wish to make the adjustment. To do either of these, click the pencil icon. Clicking it will fire up this popup:

Click the Update Manual stock adjustment button when you are done, then followed by the Apply button.

Clicking the apply button will save the changes as a draft and take you back to the draft adjustment page. To adjust an inventory adjustment draft, click the pencil icon next to it.

Note that at this point, the adjustment you made hasn't been applied to the system. To apply it to the system, you'd have to click the Apply button again.

Upon clicking that button, you will see a popup prompt asking you to confirm your action. Once you confirm, the adjustment will move Draft Stock Operation to Applied Stock Operation.

If you notice, you have the option of filtering out stock adjustments by product.

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 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

For more information about what changes impact the Awaiting, Committed and Stock columns, please see our Sample Workflow - Inventory Changes Knowledge Article.

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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