How to Manage Your 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.

There are two ways to update your inventory:

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 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.

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:

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.

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

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.

Besides adjusting stocks, you also have the option of transferring stock from one warehouse to another.  Please note that you must have at least two active warehouses for stock transfer to work.

The whole process of performing a stock transfer is illustrated below:

To initiate a stock transfer, select inventory adjustment and then create a new stock transfer. After that, select the originating warehouse (where you will be picking stock from) and the destination warehouse.

Next, select the products you wish to transfer as well as the desired quantities. If you can't find the product, try doing a search or filter the selection by season.

Note: If you attempt to push out more product quantities from a warehouse than what's available, Uphance will flag it off and highlight it in red, and you won't be able to apply the transfer.

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

If this happens, you can modify the product quantity or delete the product selection altogether.

Once you are done, hit the Apply button to effect the transfer you just made. You can view the transfer you just made and even modify it if you so desire from the Applied stock operations section.

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

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Do you want to see all your negative stock? Simply open the Current Inventory Level Report and sort the stock column in ascending order.

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:

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

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.

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

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.  

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.

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 which files 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):

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:

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.