Introducing the sales order management app for Inventory

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hey I'm Cody with Sonata Consulting and in this video I'm going to go over some inventory Basics with you hitting on so high level things like item setup warehouse management sales order purchase order processing and go through a handful of settings for you in conjunction with getting set up for selling with woocommerce or Shopify things like that but it was taken from our May 2023 monthly tutorial series on Zoho inventory and Shopify and woocommerce best practices if you find this video useful please like And subscribe any questions leave a comment down below and enjoy thanks [Music] so we want to get set up first with Zoho inventory and make sure that we've got it for you know strong Foundation of what we're doing in inventory especially we're going to tie those to those other shopping carts like Shopify woocommerce things like that and so the first thing we're going to want to do is get in here and make sure that we set up the inventory items correctly so you can come in here to inventory and then items and you'll see we've got some in here already you can come in and manually you know add those one at a time or bring them in with a spreadsheet when you come to create an item in Zoho inventory it's key to know that there are going to be kind of three different types of items that you can create one is going to be just a basic item right it's just going to be your standard item you're going to put your name in here you're going to put a skew in you're going to want to put a skew in I'd highly recommend it especially if you're tying with Shopify and woocommerce or woocommerce it's going to be critical that you make sure that each item has a skew their you know unique skus things like that you'll set your you know units and there's some things in here that you'll set pretty straightforward what to do there the things that are good to know are that you can create what's like a base level or a standard item that's just going to be just a normal item straight out and so there's other items that you can create Beyond a basic or a standard item one of them is going to be item groups and then the other one is going to be composite items we'll start with item group since it's here an item group is kind of what you'll see in Shopify for example where you have an item right and then they're kind of grouped up into um you know one bigger item and then the smaller items within it are in shopify's case called an item variant and inventories are going to call it an item group and the idea there pretty self-explanatory once you get into it it can be a little confusing from their documentation what's going on here but essentially you're going to come in here and you're going to create a good or a service and in this case let's say we're gonna you know throw some T-shirts it's a nice simple example there the what inventory groups is going to do for you that's different than just a basic item save you some time is that you can create what are called attributes or again in shopify's case it's going to be called like variants and the idea of an attribute is you've got you know let's say size and then you can come over here and you can create those sizes so you've got you know your small your uh oops it's all you got your medium and you got your large right and so by doing that you're going to see that adding these items down below but you know let's say you have more attributes right you're going to have um you know colors we don't have colors in here right now but um we'll use material and we'll just say you know uh red and blue and green right and so you'll see what's happening down below as you create each of these attributes or variants it's going to create a new item for it and so you're going to see here's your small red t-shirt here's your small blue green so on and so for it so this is a good quick easy to wait easy way to create a lot of kind of just basic items that all Belong Together really quickly because then you can put in you know your skus you can generate the skus based on things up here and you can kind of set up this Q generator to fit a little bit more closely to what you maybe have if you don't have your own skus and then you can put in your you know cost price selling price things like that just to really quickly on the Fly create a whole bunch of items the other item that you can create within Zoho inventory this one's pretty powerful this one's worth taking note is going to be your composite items and so a composite item isn't quite an item group a composite item is going to be a um kind of combination of items that are coming together to create a new item in inventory and so rather than you know here's a grouping of all these like items a composite item is going to be many items coming together to create kind of a whole new item so you could look at it as you know kidding or bundling packaging or packages things like that and so when you come in here to your items within the settings you're going to see that there's this option right here for composite items and to enable composite items you're going to want to enable that and then scroll down here and hit save once you do that when you come back over to the items you're going to see composite items is now there and so when you come to the composite items you know when you first create an item it's going to show you this overview screen which is kind of an overview of what we just talked about Standalone items composite items and item groups in this case it's going to be a composite item and this picture kind of helps demonstrate right so rather than shirts of different sizes and colors this is going to be bringing together multiple items to create kind of a new item so that a customer could come in and buy you know a outfit as opposed to they have to add a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and a belt you know to their order individually other ways you can think of composite items would be you know if you've got um like assemblies and you wanted sub assemblies you could do that where you have a whole bunch of raw materials create this item or these smaller composite items roll up to create a bigger composite item there's a lot of power in the composite items that you can work with and leverage the one thing to be aware of I'll just mention this now at the beginning Josh is it with composite items you'll want to make sure if you're going to be connecting say Shopify or woocommerce with Soho inventory that you've got your composite items created first you it can be created after the fact but once you've connected say Shopify to Zoho inventory Shopify is going to want to bring over all of its products or items into Zoho inventory which is great but at the moment Zoho inventory doesn't have a way to convert those items so you'd have to delete those items and then come back and recreate them as composite items anyway so just something to be aware of there with the composite items it is really powerful to create and use them but you kind of have to start with them in Zoho inventory and then you know connect them to those other shopping cart services so beyond the um items here I you know composite items item groups things like that some other things you're going to want to be aware of when setting up Zolo inventory are going to be things like your warehouse now you don't have to have multiple warehouses um if you don't have a need for it then it'll set up just one basic warehouse for you and everything will just kind of Nest under there but let's say you have a situation where you want to have multiple warehouses physically like actual different locations or kind of a digital Warehouse right maybe you have some stuff that you keep in like a back stock or an overflow or something like that you could come in here and create multiple warehouses and so to do that you just come in here hit new Warehouse add some information in there and Bam you've got a new Warehouse now where you're going to see these warehouses show up is if we come back over to an item here and let's just check out our giant anvils for now you'll see that when you've got a giant anvil in here um this one looks like it is not set up as an inventory item so we're not going to see it on this one so let's hop to a new one there we go so you're going to see what you get onto an item there's a couple of things to be aware of here that will go over briefly but you're going to see this stock section over here some boxes down here and then you're going to see down here stock locations and I went over this a little bit on one of our other videos kind of going over inventory more in depth so if you can hop over and check that out as well for a little more information but I'll give you a brief overview here to keep everybody up to date so down here as you'll see are the stock locations where you're going to see the stock broken down between warehouses if you have multiple warehouses and then you can just toggle between your accounting stock and your physical stock now a lot of you probably have the question is well what is the difference what's accounting stock and what is physical stock so accounting stock is going to be the stock that is in your inventory based on your accounting type transactions and so that's usually going to be you know your purchase orders for example your bills and your invoices right and then your physical stock is going to be based more off of your kind of physical transactions um mainly your uh receives your purchase order receives your shipments things like that and so because I know it can be just a little bit confusing I have built kind of a high level diagram here to help a lot of you understand what's going on there with those inventory levels because there's not a great you know diagram out there to help explain this pretty succinctly so the idea here is on your purchasing side right you're going to have a purchase order you put in that purchase order and then when you go to pay for that purchase order those items on it you're going to raise a bill and when you do that your accounting stock on hand is going to increase because you technically purchase those items now when you go to receive the purchase order your physical stock on hand is going to increase and then on the opposite side the sales side once you've confirmed a sales order or created a sales order your account and physical stock is going to be committed and I'll show you that when we hop back over to inventory and then when you invoice the sales order your accounting stock on hand will decrease and then when you ship your sales order your physical stock on hand will decrease and so if we hop back over to inventory I'll kind of show how that plays out in action right so we've got here the accounting stock right your stock in hand is 100 you've got four of those committed 96 available and so if you go to purchase more of item a let's say we need 50 more we'll put in a purchase order for that and then you will see you know down here 50 to be billed and 50 to be received once you have billed or received um that purchase order let's say we're going to bill it first so we build that purchase order this will go back down to in this case 10 or 0 just depending on how many are still sitting to be billed and so once you've built it then you're accounting stock on hand should increase by that same amount 50 in this case so your stock can handle grow 250. and then once you have received that 50 you'll see your physical stock on hand would increase to 156 in this case once you have created a sales order as shown on that diagram we showed a minute ago your committed stock will go up so let's say we put in a sales order for five of item a we're going to see committed stock go from four up by five to nine and the available for sale is just going to be a difference right so if this is nine and let's say this is 150 we're going to have a 141 for sale at the end of that and same thing happens here in the sales order that committed stock would go up by five so your committed stock is going to be seven physical and then when you've invoiced that sales order you'll see your stock on hand go down when you've shipped that sales order you'll see your stock on hand decrease and then again the available for sale will just kind of match that so these down here to help you kind of see you know how many you have to be received or billed from purchase orders this is how many you have to ship or to be invoiced from sales orders and so it's good to know that you know that kind of level of detail there that's going to be crucial to making sure your accounting level your accounting numbers are kind of always accurate right um a quick Canary in the coal mine and I shared this a little bit in my other video as well the available for sale numbers typically should match if you know for the most part the reason why these ones you know look like they're probably not matching right now is probably because you have 10 you know sitting on a PO that need to be billed and then a digital three that need to be received once those are resolved then you're available for sale numbers should match your physical and accounting stock numbers often aren't going to match and that's okay the reason for that's going to be you know a few different things one is you could be you know invoicing your sales orders right away in this case that's likely because you're here for you know Shopify and woocommerce and so they're going to invoice those immediately because those are sales coming in from a website but if you happen to be here and you know you um send out a sales order to a company and they're on say like Net 30 Terms or something right then you may feel fulfill that order before they actually pay it and so you might just see an inverse in those numbers maybe not quite matching up so this is going to be the overall stock levels to be aware of now if you have your stock split between multiple warehouses you will have to kind of know this but take into account that those could be divided over two or three or ten different Warehouse locations and so in that case you'll want to make sure that you're also looking over here to make sure you've got the right Warehouse selected and you know you're looking at accounting or physical stock now one thing just to help clarify this because it is really confusing most of Zoho inventory and pretty much all of Zoho books is actually using the accounting stock there are a few places where the physical stock is going to get used in the case of Zola inventory and there is a setting within Zoho inventory that says you know to use the physical stock it's a little misleading it doesn't mean that it's going to convert everything over to using physical stock for its um you know adjustments and things like that what that really boils down to is if we come over here again to inventory and items this stock on hand number by default is going to be accounting when you change it to physical then you'll see your physical stock on hand there's a few other minor places that changes but that's probably your biggest one so just be aware most likely the accounting numbers here or the stock numbers you're going to see in various parts throughout the whole inventory and especially in Zoho books are going to be the accounting stock numbers and so from there I just want to take you guys quickly through you know a quick sales order process a quick purchase order process just so you can kind of see those uh those orders and then we'll move into kind of going over some of the settings that I think are really important to know to make sure you're getting inventory set up correctly so if we come over here to sales orders when we pop in here you can either come to sales orders and then you'll see this overview screen you can set up some filters to kind of bring it you know into what you're looking for and then you can hit a new sales order over here or if you see these little plus signs next to these you can always click one of those and it'll take you straight into that order creation once we're in here on the sales order you'll want to make sure you select a customer name now once you've tied this to a shopping cart um all of those details from the order are going to come over and automatically create a sales order for you so you're not going to have to manually recreate anything but this is in case you are doing it in inventory or you need to manually put something in for some reason or just to be aware of what's going on so you've got your customer name you'd select that you can set this up if you hit this gear icon to just automatically you know generate your sales order numbers I'd highly recommend doing it that way just so that you don't have to manually create them each time but you can set that to be manually created as well um if you're polling specifically say woocommerce or shopify's you know order numbers and you want those to be this you know matching within the system then I would say set it to manually and have it just feed those in for you just be aware that you know you want to try and avoid overlapping those numbers in case you're working the system from both sides from there you can put in a reference number and if you need to likely when you've tied it to a third party they'll usually pipe in the reference number as the order number from the other service so if it's uh order coming in from Shopify you'll see shopify's actual order number here and then this sales order number can be entirely different or matching your call from there it will come down right fill out all these details that make sense the red ones are going to be required for you to fill out and then you'll just add your your line items here so this is where you'll come in and you know you want to get it a five pack of dynamite sticks throw it on there right you want to come in here and add in a let's say a radio and you can once you get those added you can come in here and adjust quantities adjust raids all sorts of adjustments that you can do in here you can change the warehouse it's coming from if you have multiple warehouses set up for that product if you've got it turned on you can toggle on shipping charges and adjustments so you can make some fine tune you know changes there if needs be and set up your order once you have it set up you can save it and confirm you can save it and send it straight out save and print things like that or if you're not quite ready you can always just save it as a draft and come back to it and work on it again later again once you've created that sales order that sales order is going to Mark the inventory as committed so in this case if we set this to five and say we want three five packs so 15 total sticks of dynamite then these items are going to show this amount committed to each one of those until that sales order is invoiced and fulfilled from there there's the other order to look at which is going to be the purchase orders and purchase orders run pretty similar to sales orders but just you know this is the order that you're going to send to your vendors to purchase those items so from there you're going to set your vendor name um you're going to you know say to deliver to either a warehouse or to a direct customer if you're kind of you know putting in a purchase order and it's just going to you know ship straight to them rather than to one of your warehouses similar to a drop shipment and then you're going to come in here and just make sure your purchase order number Spilled Out again you can toggle on automatic purchase order numbering you're gonna you got a reference field here in case you need it and then it works pretty much the same as your sales order right you put in your items your levels things like that now a lot of you are probably noticing there's a few things in this that maybe don't quite look like your system test link for example this item custom things like that these are going to be custom fields that you can put on to your sales orders your invoices your purchase orders whatnot so don't be too afraid if you're seeing things that you know are here that aren't in your system or vice versa maybe someone helps set up your system and there's some custom things there that you're not seeing on mine those can all be changed within the preferences once you go into that preferences page you would just come down to that particular module so let's say in that case we were looking at a purchase order we'd come down to purchase orders and then we just come over here to field customization and then from there we would see that's where those custom fields are we can create new ones or manually adjust any custom fields that are potentially already there so here's a good example custom field one you can come over here and edit change it things like that so that's going to be your sales order and sales orders and purchase orders again they're likely going to come in automatically the sales orders from your um your store if you've got a third-party store attached to it so it's worth sending over you know one or two is kind of a test just to make sure things are right where you want and they're dialed in things like that and in a moment here we're going to kick it over to Josh she's going to show us how to set up Shopify and woocommerce and you know getting those things kind of set up and connected right so it's working for you um so before Josh takes over I'm gonna just really quickly come through some of these settings and just go over some high level things that are really worth knowing to make sure you've got things set up the way you you want them set up as you um kind of build out your inventory to make sure that things are working the way you would oh so first of all when you come into preferences there's going to be this General screen here um this top section here is going to change from time to time on which modules you'd like to enable often it's going to be you know these few here but they may be rolling out a beta module um or something new in the future and so you know just take these as you would if you're going to turn them on or not um you know retain your invoices pick lists tasks things like that if if you don't have a need form not returning them on coming down you can you know set up your PDF attachments and things like that if you're going to be sending out a lot of these as as PDFs you do also have a way to set up those templates for those PDFs so you can really dial those in so that the customers are seeing exactly what you want and it's branded the way you want if you're going to give discounts are you going to give them on a line item or at a transaction level or just don't give discounts at all you'd set that setting there um any additional charges I showed this on the orders before but you can toggle on or off adjustments and shipping charges I'd highly recommend considering the shipping charges one if you want to kind of allocate those shipping charges separately um so that you can just turn that on and the shipping charges get put into the right line item and then you can just pull reports pretty easily if you don't want that on but you still want to capture shipping charges as maybe a line item on the actual order as opposed to kind of a separate charge at the bottom you can do that as well it just usually means you have to bring in Zoho analytics or something like that to kind of tie shipping charges back into the reports you're looking for and then adjustments that's usually really good to have on just in case you need to make some tweak or change to the order at the end to just get things right you've got you know you want to throw them a sweet discount or you know something you don't like so you want to you know charge them a little bit more whatever here's where you're going to set if you've got tax rates and if it's inclusive exclusive um or kind of a I guess either or option there rounding off not many people round off their transactions but it's there this is going to usually be toggled off by default if you want to add a salesperson so you know who sold what I'd suggest toggling that on this salesperson field is kind of its own Standalone field so you'll have to kind of put people into that it's not going to pull from um you know a set database somewhere else so just be sure to be aware of that if you do type third party service on then you can connect those details together on the other side and then this mode is stopped tracking here physical stock tracking or account stop tracking this is what I was mentioning before you can set one or the other I often recommend to people to just turn on physical so that when somebody's looking their you know inventory specialist is looking at items in inventory they see what do we have in the warehouse physically right what is here um and then just make sure everybody's aware that everything behind the scenes um is going to pretty much all run an accounting stock and so just to be aware of that that's going on and that's really just going to set it for that high level View and then you can change here if you want to automatically or manually update your inventory counts based on Standalone bills and invoices and I go over that a little bit more in my other video so it's going to be your general settings from there there's a few other settings to be aware of you know customers and vendors that's good to know in case you are B2B you can set it as a business here or if you're selling to individuals you know usually if you've got a shop fire woocommerce a likely you're going to be selling to individuals then you can toggle it as an individual as opposed to a business and it's just going to rearrange some of the formatting and things there and then um you know from there you can see that there's some other options over here for you to look at you know if you toggled on tasks you can come in here and make some tweaks there um and then you've got customer vendor portals if you need to use those as well you can toggle those on and and build those out um so that's kind of the high level there there's a few other things you know you can come down into the models as I mentioned earlier and make some changes there this items page is definitely worth taking some time to look at you're gonna have you can set your decimal rate for your item quantity so if you're adding quantity let's say it's an item that's measured in um I don't know feet or inches right something like that but you need it to go out more than two decimal places then you can come in here and change that to go further out or if you just needed to always be a whole number or a single decimal place you can change that as well measurements you can change those in case you're not you know using kind of American measurements you're using you know metric system you can change those from you know into centimeters pounds to kilograms things like that and then you know select when barcodes are scanned if you've got if you're wanting to set up the barcode stuff you can do that again I'm going to suggest you just across the board unless you absolutely know you need to use ISBN UPC or ean's um SKU is going to be your best friend there for duplicate item names you can turn this on but it will make sure it will mandate that you add the SKU field active and set as mandatory because once you've turned this on it's no longer using item names as kind of a unique identifier for each item so just be aware of that um I'd highly recommend setting the SKU as active and mandatory regardless because it's going to make everything else that Josh goes over here later much simpler to tie those items together on both sides and then here's again we went over this a little bit but here's where you'd enable your composite items and then here's some Advanced inventory tracking if you're so inclined you can enable serial number tracking that's kind of its own thing we'd probably have to you know create a video for that another time to go over that in depth because there's a lot of things involved with the serial number tracking and quite a bit as well with the batch tracking and so you can turn those on and then you can configure do you want those to happen on your physical stuff your packages purchase receives returns or on the accounting side the invoices the bills things like that and then down here prevent stock from going below zero um I'm not sure how woocommerce does it we'll have to take a look but in Shopify I know that they do that on an item by item level and so um just be aware Zoho inventory is going to do that across the whole account um usually I recommend unless you have a hard stop on items and you make sure you absolutely don't want them to go below zero it's where it's just leaving that unchecked so that they can go below zero you can place back orders and things like that again you'll have to make sure that everything on Shopify and I'm guessing probably woocommerce as well um match up so if you you know prevent them from going below zero in inventory then you'll have to make sure all the items in Shopify you know on an item by item basis also say to prevent blowing going below zero you can also set a warning to let you know when you're out of stock on a certain item or to notify you when your item is reached a certain reorder point and you'll set those reorder points on that item creation page that we were going over before and then last thing is just tracking landed costs if you want to track those landed costs on these transactions I suggest turning that on it's going to make a little bit easier to just do it as you're you know kind of building out the orders you can leave that off and track it separately but again you'll need to bring in like Zoho analytics or some other um piece of analyzing software to kind of bring those numbers back in time together and so from there I'm going to touch just briefly here on the pricing for Zoho inventory and then we'll turn some time over to Josh to show you guys on setting up the Shopify and woocommerce Integrations so zova one most of you will likely have Zola one if you do here's kind of what you're going to get with Zoho inventory within Zoho one um so we're taking a look at that to kind of see what's going on there and then your pricing is just going to be dependent on you know how many users you have with your 01 license for how much that's going to end up being per month if you're buying this as a standalone as opposed to Zoho one then they've got this breakdown of each of the different categor the different levels that you could purchase it's currently set as yearly you could toggle that to monthly if you're doing a month to month but you're going to get some savings by going yearly and then you can see here's going to show you a breakdown of what each one's going to offer you there and so from there I want to show you guys just real quick where you're going to go and set up those Integrations for the shopping carts and then I'm going to hand it over to Josh to take things from there and kind of dig in deeper with each of these but for that you're going to go to your settings again that settings gear over here right from there you'll see Integrations and then it's going to be under shopping cart and that's going to be your Shopify and your woocommerce are going to be under here if it's a shopping cart that's a little more kind of third party if you will that's going to be other e-commerce Amazon Etsy Ebay things like that but if you're a little more in control of your shopping cart then it's likely going to be under that shopping cart Tab and that's where you're going to see those thank you