Just sharing our first Physical Inventory experience and sharing a couple of suggestions to Altru on how they can improve this process.
First of all, when we were given the sales pitch for Altru as a POS
system we were told we could use iPad‰Ûªs to do the Physical Inventory
counts. Unfortunately the iPad works so
poorly with the system it‰Ûªs not worth trying.
You really need a laptop. Just FYI.
The first thing we did is run an ‰ÛÏInventory
Report‰Û for the Beginning Inventory Costs. I'm really glad it occurred to me we needed to do this, as you can't run this report for a past date/time.
Then we used three laptops and went through the
store scanning items and entering their counts into the Physical Count Batch.
This process went really well. The only trick here is you need you
have all your items grouped together. If you have items in different
locations in the store or in back-stock this can get a bit tricky. That
issue aside I was really pleased with the process of counting the items in the
store.
After posting those batches I ran a query to see
what items had not been counted. Figuring out how to run this query was
challenging - Rachel came to save the day with this one. (Thanks Rachel!) You need to create a query
selection for the items that were counted.
Then you have to create another query for the items not included in the
first query selection. That really threw me off
but it makes sense now that it‰Ûªs done.
This query showed some items we accidentally skipped while counting and other
items that were completely missing from the store. So we created another batch
to update those items.
I learned the hard way that if you accidentally
enter an item in a batch twice it won‰Ûªt notify you of the duplication when you
validate the batch. Therefore I ran
another query of all the items that had been counted and exported those results
to Excel and used Excel‰Ûªs conditional formatting feature to identify the
duplicate values. There were some items that were counted twice, each time with a different amount. So we entered one last batch fixing those.
Then we ran the ‰ÛÏInventory Report‰Û again for the
Ending Inventory Costs.
And done! With the exception of learning
how to create the queries for the items we missed or counted twice I was pretty
happy with how the inventory counts went.
However, I was much less happy with the process
of running the post-inventory reports as these are basically non-existent in
Altru. Instead I used a combination of the pre-built reports and a
couple of queries. I exported the data
from those reports/queries into Excel and there I was able to piece together the various types
of reports our auditor asks for. This was a terribly time consuming and frustrating process. :(
Idea's for Altru:
When validating merchandise batches (both Receiving batches and Physical Inventory batches) it would really be helpful to be notified of items that were entered twice.
Please, please, please add a pre-built inventory report that shows the beginning inventory cost and quantity, the ending inventory cost and quantity, and the variances between them. This report should have the ability to view each item separately or view it grouped by department.
Dianne
