Streamline Your Workflow with the Zoho Invoice Template for Management

Zoho invoice template for Management

Cody here with Sonata Consulting again today I want to go over that age-old question of I've got inventory how do I set it up what do I do what are the things I need to make sure are in place before I get in and start using it so I'm going to walk you guys through a little inside training of how I audit the systems that come through zenada for just a basic ready to go for Zoho inventory so make sure as you see those cool graphics flash across the screen to take a moment like And subscribe and let's go ahead and get into it foreign [Music] so here we are in Zoho inventory and the absolute first thing I'm going to recommend is ignore this dashboard it's it's okay it's a good dashboard but we want to get in and start setting up some of the core kind of features functionalities of getting the system up and running or let you know what the heck those buttons mean so that you can decide for yourself if that's going to be what you want to do so we want to come up here to this little gear icon for settings up in the top right here and when that drops down that menu we're going to hit preferences under preferences you're going to be met with additional side tab of more menu options the big ones we're going to focus on today are going to be General we'll probably touch a little bit on like customers and vendors we'll get into items a little bit maybe dabble in some units of measurements stuff like that and then once we're done with the going through these various setting options we'll hit a few more over here we're going to hop over and I'm going to show you guys a little bit about items and what's going on there here we are in general and under the general settings up here don't be surprised if this isn't exactly what you're going to see in your system for the most part these should match up if you're watching this pretty recently but a lot of times the NADA will push you know a new feature into inventory or something like that so your system may have a few more options less options different options to enable or not up here they're basically just different modules that you can turn on or features that you can turn on the fact that I can't see your screen right now I can't tell you what all of them mean but I can tell you what these ones mean retainer invoices if you need retainer invoices you would turn that on pick lists in case packaging and then shipping wasn't enough and you just really love that extra step of a pick list so you can send somebody out to go fetch stuff in the warehouse and get it ready you can turn that on and then tasks not very much use but it's there from there we've got some options here I'll let you read through some of these on your own because they're not going to be pertinent to most people or the defaults are going to be just fine I'm going to touch on some of the ones that are going to be a little bit more necessary or high level for people to be aware of so here you've got PDF attachments if you're going to be sending PDF attachment stuff do you give discounts this one's a big one to look at if you do give discounts are you going to put them on the line item level meaning you've got a sales order there's three items on that sales order item number one is going to have a five percent discount item number two is going to have a 20 discount and item number three is going to have a you know 15 discount then you'd want to turn on at item level if it's just a whole transaction discount the sales order gets you know fifty percent off then you just turn on the transaction level option there the next one down select any additional charges you would like to add I'm going to really emphasize people take a moment to think about this one before deciding turning it on or off mostly beside before determining not to turn it on or off at the beginning because you can always turn these on or off later if you so chose but it's going to make things a little bit easier to have it on at the beginning of your system so that people are using it correctly so the additional charges you can add on here is going to be adjustments and shipping charges adjustments is going to be an additional field on your sales order that is going to let you actually adjust the price of the sales order similar to a discount but it's an adjustment line so you can adjust it up if you really don't like that guy or you can adjust it down if it's your grandma or whatever kind of Direction you want so the adjustment line is just a nice extra little box for you to be able to even after discounts are done to still make an adjustment so it's really kind of a powerful little thing to have in there and the nice thing is it doesn't have to be filled out so it's good to have on just in case you need to make an adjustment for shipping charges if you don't just flat rate all of your shipping or you want to pass the you know charges on to the customer or something like that where there's huge fluctuations in your your various shipping charges you'll want to turn that on that's going to give you the ability to put in the charges for shipping and then when you go to do those reports you're going to know you know that you spend 25 or 50 or you know two thousand dollars or whatever on a freight shipping you're going to know because it's going to be separated out of a line item for shipping and not just included the total of your sales order so that's going to be really good for metrics for later round off most people aren't going to round off so don't worry about that unless you're a gymnast then round off to your heart's desire I want to add a field for a salesperson I would recommend definitely considering trading that one on because it is going to give you again an additional feel on your sales order your estimates invoices things like that to track who sold the thing this is going to be great for running reports and metrics and stuff for commissions or other reports to know how people are doing with their sales so it's worth considering turning on the sales person so that you just have that metric kind of set aside and you can determine when and if you want to select a sales person or not billable bills love this one nobody really uses it very much but it's fun to say and it's basically an option for you to have a default markup percentage on all of your orders if that makes sense to enable go for it I don't know if I've ever had one enabled but it's there mode of star tracking so there's two options here it's going to be defaulted to accounting stock because accounting stock is kind of the core stock tracking um option within inventory and books if you need a little bit more detail on that check out my other video where I go into some of those details of stock tracking the accounting default stock is going to make sense to to keep there a lot of people leave it there um simply because they don't know what changing this means the nice thing is it doesn't change a whole lot so you don't have to worry too much about changing it but what it does change is very helpful if you have a dedicated Warehouse you know inventory specialist who's going to be just looking at items really quick so if we hop over to an item page for example here's just a list of all items within this demo account you'll see here for item number one stock on hand 77. we click on that item we come here and look at physical stock it says 77. now if we come over here and we change that to accounting stock which is what it was defaulted as if you remember and then we hop back over here again the number that we're going to see here instead of 77 is going to be 57. so it can be a little confusing having accounting stocks set on there by default because your inventory person is going to come in here and look at items and think stock could hand us physical stock on hand right because they're in charge of counting it looking at it it's their baby so it's worth considering changing that to physical stock this is going to be one of the few probably the biggest areas that that has changed most other areas it's not going to change unfortunately so just be aware of that I'll just drop this in as a kind of useful nugget when you do something like an inventory adjustment it's actually going to be pulling in accounting stock not physical so like I said it's not a massive change but just something to be aware of and I'll kind of just show that again here real quick for those of you who did catch the other video but you'll see here quantity available 57 right which was the accounting stock so that can be a little confusing so just be aware that that is what physical and accounting stock do when you change those it's again it kind of mentions it here it's still going to use accounting stock for most of what's going on but it could be helpful to turn on that physical stock and then this last one physical stock it's updated automatically when you raise Standalone bills and invoices I would just say leave this one on it's your choice is going to be automatic or manual you could turn it to manual if you really love extra work and effort and just you know like getting in there and making things happen by hand but if you just want to be able to raise a standalone and just have it transact automatically then just leave it on automatic but that's what that changes there so that's everything in general but we've got a couple of other sections I want to go over real quick with you just to give you like I said a good understanding of what is going on in inventory and what to set up before you really get started so when we come over here to customers and vendors you know you're going to see a checkbox here to allow duplicates for customer and vendor displaying means your choice if you want that on or not typically I recommend for people not to turn on the allowed duplicates because it can cause some confusion if you have two vendors with the exact same name so it's worth keeping it off just to make sure that that you don't have those crossovers but if you need it there's that option default customer type this one's a pretty important one is your customer a business or an individual if it's a hybrid probably go with something like business but if you're absolutely B to B you want this to be checked as business what that means is you're going to have accounts and then if you have people that you contact within that particular you know business or customer entity then they're going to be contact people on that account the individual is going to kind of push that up a level right so then you know your your Bob Smith who comes to buy your product he's going to be the customer not uh whatever business Bob Smith might work for so be aware of that worth toggling that to fit your needs there if you have to deal with customer credit you can enable the credit limit there with that check box and then the rest of this is going to be placeholder stuff for PDF not not too much to worry about there so the next section I want to talk about is items right we're in Zoho inventory items is what we want to talk about within items there's a few things to be aware of what's going on in here this first one set a decimal rate for your item quantity it's defaulted to two just leave it unless you absolutely want you know to push out how many decimal places your item quantities can be then 2 is going to be your standard so that's going to mean 1.45 inches right or 2.35 pieces whatever right so usually just leave that but if you have Dimensions that you need to measure differently you can change those here so instead of inches let's say you know centimeters instead of pounds you can change it to kilograms or grams or ounces and then the select items when barcodes are scanned using you can change here from SKU ISBN UPC and Ean most often just leave it to skew duplicate item name this one can work to make it work you do have to absolutely make sure that your SKU is set to mandatory and you do that just by toggling over here to filled customization coming down to SKU and making sure that it's set as mandatory I have a set as mandatory in this system by default I believe it's going to be off it is going to be highly beneficial to consider turning on mandatory skew right from the beginning because that SKU is going to be your identifier for that product for that item so if the name changes down the road or you have two products that have a very similar name something like that you can still have that skew be that identifying piece for that item and so in this case if you allow duplicate item names that SKU would need to be there yeah as the primary field to make sure that you know the right item is getting selected and not just the item that's named the same coming down to price lists this is if you you know have different types of price lists that you want to enable for your items let's say you have a wholesale price list or or you know uh I don't know happy customer price list whatever right you can enable those price lists here and then you can set them up in another part of inventory to enable for your various clients composite items I would absolutely tell everybody to enable composite items very rarely do I come across a case where somebody's not going to use composite items I'm going to get more into composite items what they mean what's going on in another video so keep an eye out for that video but let's just say turn it on we're here let's just get it on and if you don't use it it doesn't really matter all that much you can leave it on or If eventually you're just like yeah we don't use it at all you can come turn it off inventory start date this one's a pretty important one not to be messed with too heavily basically what day do you want inventory to kind of start considering your inventory transactions right so pick a date and stick with it make sure it's a date that doesn't have any transactions or anything happening before it you know you you get a good solid count of your inventory by by that date so that you can say this is when our inventory starts it can be you know backdated if you kind of got a late start or something like that but you're going to want to make sure that your beginning counts are very close Not Dead on or that you have really good adjustments to get those numbers back to where they need to be Advanced inventory tracking now this is the section where you're going to get into some more advanced inventory tracking types A lot of people want to enable these but I'm going to give you a little bit of a recommendation to maybe hold off until you're sure that you absolutely are going to use these because once they're on they're kind of on for good and you need to make sure that you know you're you're kind of committed to and sticking to using them if you're going to turn them on and so serial numbers that's just to enable the ability to track serial numbers against a particular product batch tracking is going to be you know let's say you are selling medicine right you need to make sure you track which batch that medicine came from or or let's say you're selling some piece of technology right the hottest new Gizmo and until you've got different variations or iterations of that product because you know 1.0 is different than 1.1 because of a new component you're going to want that batch tracking on so that if a recall happens or something like that you can go back and find which batch that came from now if you turn these on it is very much worth coming in here to this configure and making sure that these inventory tracking preferences are exactly what you're expecting okay you only get two options you get the physical or the accounting stock track right so you either get packages purchase receives and returns that's that physical one or invoices sales receipts bills and credit notes that's that accounting track I can't tell you which one but I can tell you most people usually end up with the physical one because when they receive product they're going to then put in those serial numbers or those batches and then when they ship them right when they go to package that sales order they're going to associate that serial or that batch at that time the accounting route does make sense in some cases but you've got to realize that it's on the invoice so when somebody pays for their sales order or the bill when you're paying for your purchase order and so sometimes that's just not the right time so just to be aware of those and then they did give us an option recently to mandate serial number or batch tracking and transactions now this is a new feature so I have it quite vetted it entirely but what I can tell you is I believe what's happening is that it's saying you know let's say you've turned on zero tracking and you've enabled item a to be serial tracked now this doesn't mean that you can just put a serial number on at whatever point in the you know the history of the transactions that you want and it's just going to work magically and what I understand so far what this means is you can choose at the time of purchase do I want this particular you know 100 or whatever that I'm purchasing right now do I want to apply a serial number to these and then the next one do I not want to apply a serial number to these on that specific item right you can turn a whole item on or off zero tracking is fine but I believe this just allows you to choose when you do and don't want to track cereals on a product but again I believe you have to still put it in at the time of the you know the receive or the bill in order to use it in a sales order um or invoice transaction I'll update you more in the future if I get a better understanding on that like I said it's a new feature from there there's a few little hidden options down here at the bottom but definitely worth considering prevent stock from going below zero I would say just leave that unchecked for most people that gives you the ability to dip below zero so that you can back order potentially right or put in a pre-order on something when you have it turned on it's going to hard stop at zero which works for some people they're like nope we only have this much quantity so if that's you that's your case then feel free to turn it on is however a system-wide setting there are other systems like in Shopify for example you can set that on a per item level but in inventory it's going to be just one and done so whatever you need to do there there are some other methods you can kind of employ to make sure that you're still catching things before they run out and we'll dabble on that a little bit as we go show an out of stock warning when an item stock drops below zero that's what I was just mentioning right it just warns you hey you're at zero you're below zero you know this needs to get replenished you can also set on each individual item reorder points so you can say notify me when an item's quantity reaches that reorder point so rather than getting completely down to zero or below uh let me know at 20. let me know in 50 you know we've got six months lead time so let me know at a thousand that we need more whatever you can turn on that notification feature there and then tracking landed costs on items if you need to know how much you sold an item for in total you can get that from just the basics but if you turn on the track Landing costs it's going to separate out those Landing costs now you will still need to put in those numbers right when you go to put in that order you're still going to need to put in the landing costs but it is going to kind of itemize that out for you so that you can pull some better metrics or reports on that later so that's everything for items next we're going to hop into a few of these other items over here and kind of go over those so unit of measurements this is where you're going to put in or edit those units of measurements we kind of briefly touched on earlier so you know a box right or centimeters a dozen feet things like that this is where you're going to come in and you can take out ones that you're just absolutely not going to use or um you know if you just really don't like pieces being short-handed to PCS as the symbol you could change that this symbol is likely what you're going to see on all of your transactions so just be aware of that you know if you wanted it to be spelled out long hand just come in and change the symbol name there you know the eagle-eyed among you probably see this unit conversion over here really cool feature really terribly documented what you can do with this is let's say you buy something by the meter right you're buying it outside of America so you're buying it by the meter but when it gets in here right you want it by by the foot because you know that's the way America does it and so you want that conversion to happen you can enable the unit conversions I may actually just end up making a video on this sometime because it's kind of confusing and I'm not going to go into it on this video but needless to say that's how you can set up unit conversions to happen so that you can purchase or sell it in one unit and have it be the other on the other side of that transaction you can also as a little you know Stinger into that other video you can enable unit conversions for things like let's say you know a box but we also have you know eaches for that box you could set up a unit conversion to say you know this box of 100 means when I go to put in a purchase of you know that particular unit to my vendor they're going to just see hey I need five boxes right but then when you reced it into your inventory um because it's a box of 500 you're gonna receive 500 individual units into your inventory not five boxes that you then have to go and you know create a transaction for a breakdown so if you're brave get in there and try it if not wait and like I said we'll uh we'll get you a video soon so that's most of what I want to hit on on the preferences section the rest of this you can kind of dive into yourself uh looking at some of these other things here most of them are just going to be you know if we look at sales order for example it's going to be some special you know fields or options for that particular module or record type right so sales orders you know do you want addresses on the sales order do you want the customer notes do you want the terms and conditions that kind of stuff so I think most people can figure out the rest of these from here I will point out though these are the places let's say you have a special need right you have additional information that Zoho doesn't have on their sales order that you want to include you can come into these modules any one of them and they should have a field customization option up here at the top so you can click on that and you'll see the sales person because we toggled it on it's a hard-coded one so it's going to be black with a lock and that means that we can't do anything there but if you see this blue one down here that is a custom field that we can edit change get rid of add new ones whatever you gotta looks like a 103 104 custom fields that you can put in on any record so just be aware it can get a little much if you put a lot of custom fields on there but it can really really help too to make sure that it that you're kind of molding the transactions to fit better with your workflow so from here I'm going to hop into back over on this kind of settings bar again again not preferences but settings and just go over a few things here currencies everybody got to get paid right everybody's got to get you know currencies in their own different denominations and so this is where you're going to go in and see that you're going to see here's the base currency it's set up as you know the United States dollar and you're going to see all these other currencies now again if you love manual labor you can come in here and add your own new currencies you can put in the exchange rates you can keep up to date on it or you can just come in here and enable exchange rate feeds and once you've enabled that it's going to keep kind of a automatic update of those feeds so worth considering for those of you who like to uh work a little smarter not harder to just enable that and move on from there we're gonna let's barely talk about taxes I'm not going to get super into it that's something more for John and our finance team to go over with you guys but just want to drop you in here in case you feel brave enough to jumping into taxes so first thing you're going to see connect to avalara I'm just going to say just worth it worth the money to just invest in you know connecting to Avalar it's just going to solve so many headaches and problems however again if it's not in the budget if you love manual labor you can always enable the sales tax and just handle it manually God bless you if you decide to go that route pop in over here we're going to go back into templates again real brief overview on this the templates are going to be at PDF view of those transactions that you're conducting right so we've talked a lot about sales owners we'll hop over here to a sales order so if we come over here and we click at it you'll see a pdf version of that transaction and so you can come in here and make some changes now I will say this natively you can't change a ton about this you can change a handful of things you can turn a few things off move a few things around you'll just have to get in here and play around just be aware there's these little sections over here that a lot of people Miss on occasion for template properties then you can come over here to your header right and you'll see some different options there or the item table this is where a lot of people need to make some changes um you know your formulas stuff like that so you can do some changes if you absolutely need to do changes beyond what is capable in here natively you can request the very nicely please and thank yous right really pamper that bottom but you can request Zoho inventory um or Zoho support I guess to enable a more involved feature-rich editor for this it's not for the designers out there to just get in and go crazy it is going to involve some HTML coding and things like that so just be aware it's a little extra work but it could totally absolutely be worth it for you and your company if you guys just really need to dial in those PDF documents so that's the template section there's quite a few in there to look at feel free to get in there and go crazy ignore this one as you can see it's beta if you have it enabled good for you if you don't don't worry about it it's coming soon but we're gonna hop from templates now and we are going to jump to us briefly into Integrations if there's anything I missed by the way feel free to just say so in the comments or check out club Zen to um you know just have your voice be heard and make sure that we're covering all the things things that really matter to you because I really hate making videos when people decide boring skit you know out to a next section in Integrations this is where you're going to tie inventory to other services we can't get into all the nuances of like when you're tying inventory to this service you actually have to go from that side things like that there's a few nuances but I'm just going to go over some of the high level stuff right when we jump into Integrations you're going to see shipping that's the first page we're going to land on from here you can set up your UPS account if you have one a USPS account if you have one you probably noticed that you can instead of FedEx sorry it's not available yet natively there are some ways to get FedEx into here though don't worry but just out of the box it's not there now for those of you who want to track tracking numbers things like that shipment status updates that kind of stuff but maybe don't have a whole lot of needs I would just encourage you to activate aftership it's developed by Zoho and it's going to just add some additional functionality to your inventory system I don't know why it's just there by default but it's not you have to set up a quick little aftership account and stuff but then you could tie it in and it will just improve a lot of things USPS and UPS again you can tie in as well now below that you're going to see some third-party options you know easy post easy ship uh it looks like Envy is another one on here right now if you don't see one on here you can reach out to us or you can reach out to Zoho to see what's going on there right see if they can get it turned on or something but these are the ones that are here right now I'm going to help some of you now okay this is a tidbit this is a inside cheat code if you will easy post and easy ship not the same company easy post is if you're just worried about buying labels that's it that's easy post right label purchasing if you need some better streamlined more robust fulfillment Solutions as well as label purchasing but fulfillment is the big thing you need easy ship is where you're going to want to look you'll need to set up an account with easy ship it's a third party but they they tie in real nicely with Zoho inventory and then you're going to be given some better fulfillment solution options in Easy ship that's going to speed up quite a few steps that you can't speed up very easily in Zoho inventory so worth considering from Shipping we're going to hop to shopping carts now shopping carts and e-commerce almost the exact same thing I'm not entirely sure why they separated them but shopping carts is where you're going to see Shopify uh woocommerce some of those types of things that you can tie into Soho inventory and then e-commerce is going to be where you tie in Surprise kind of other shopping carts but these are usually more ones that aren't in your control right Amazon eBay Etsy Walmart those types of services so that's those I can't really dive too much into anything specific any of these because each one of them is just its own thing it would almost be its own video series to dive into them but I do know I believe it's Josh recently released a video about tying Shopify to Zoho inventory that would be totally worth checking out so go check that one out alright so that's going to conclude most of the like I said high level settings preferences stuff like that that you're going to want to make sure you set up an inventory there's a few last little things I want to go over real quick before I let you go to go crazy and you know set things up and start you know selling so if we hop back over here to the kind of main inventory section I'll start from the bottom there's this reports right here um I can't get too much into this because there's just this is like its own world it's a whole series again but what I would say is there's a handful of General courts in here some of them are pretty good some of them are garbage but some of them are pretty good so I would recommend once you've gotten a few transactions in here a few items things like that poke around find some of these reports see which ones you like and if you like them I highly recommend starring them little little empty star give a little gold and then it'll pop up here as a favorite right at the top then you don't have to go hunt for it every single time and if you didn't start and somebody asked for a report you're like oh shoot I know it's in there you can come up here and search for the report I use it all the time but yeah I just want to touch on that go through them and look see which ones work for you and which ones don't if you cannot find something that works for you reach out to us that's what we're here for and we'll make you the coolest report you have ever seen so from reports the last thing I want to touch on real quick is your inventory kind of setup right so once you've clicked on inventory you're going to see items composite items item groups and then some additional things Priceless inventory adjustments Transporters I'm not going to go into depth on these this is going to be another video but I just want to high level let you know kind of what's going on here so for items this is going to be your basic items you've seen me come here quite a few times right this is just standard base level items composite items and item groups are going to be kind of collections of items so item groups there's nothing in here yet so it kind of gives you this nice little screen of where to start but item groups is going to be grouping items together so you know this example is really good you've got a t-shirt you want to sell you've got a small medium large and you've got red yellow and blue but you need them all nine of those items right so you can come in here and create an item group for you know let's say zenada t-shirt and then you can say I need sizes and you can put in all your sizes colors put in all your colors and then it's going to create all those items for you well create the high level details of all those items for you composite items are a little bit different they're going to put dissimilar items together to create a new item right so that would be you know in this case a shirt a pair of shorts at a belt is going to make an outfit right so then you can sell that composite outfit as a standalone item a skew for someone to purchase you can also you know make this a kit or bundle there's all sorts of words for the composite item but it's basically bringing together other items to create a new item from there we've got price lists this is where the other side in the settings that I mentioned this where you can come in and build those price lists and you know associate them to the correct customers and things like that and then down here uh inventory adjustments we've gone over this a little bit in other videos and then transfer orders just be aware inventory adjustments will adjust both of your stocks up and down at the same time accounting and physical again be aware of that and then transfer orders is going to be for those of you who turn on multi-warehousing and you need to move products from Woolen Warehouse to another in one transaction that's going to be your transfer orders that is my audit that I do for everybody who comes to Sonata who needs help with inventory that's how I recommend anybody to initially just get in and set up their inventory there's some options in there for you to kind of consider what's going to work best for you there's some recommendations in there for what I would absolutely say to turn on or maybe not even worry about but these things are going to be crucial to making sure you set up early in the process whenever we have to come in and help somebody solve these things later it is a big headache so go forth and uh you know do some cool inventory stuff and feel a little bit more comfortable with knowing what the heck you're doing foreign