Tracking Supplies and Consumables

Benefits

Ventipix Asset & Inventory Manager platform enables an organization to know the quantities of its supplies and consumables that it has on hand and shows all the details of its stock consumption.

Whenever an inventory adjustment is made, accompanying data can be captured for traceability purposes, such as what inventory was used, who used it, and when it was used.

The platform also enables an organization to avoid costly stock-out events as it can be configured to send email notifications, push notifications, or webhooks for stock items that are about to expire or about to run low.

Getting Started

What you will need

Barcodes or NFC tags

If your inventories have existing barcodes, as long as they are unique for each inventory, you can use them to identify the inventory.

If you don’t have any barcodes or NFC tags, you can generate and print barcodes, or program the NFC tags.

Note:

• if you plan to scan barcodes with our iOS or Android app, be sure that they are in a supported format.
• with NFC tags, you can either use its serial ID or program it with your own unique values.

The Smartphone App

Download the iOS or Android app that will help you to scan barcodes, QR Codes, or NFC tags. In addition, you will also be able to fill in and submit data pertaining to the inventory being scanned.

You will need to create user accounts for those who should use the smartphone app, and also grant permissions to relevant sections or features of the app.

Note – although the smartphone app is recommended, you can use a webcam or Bluetooth/USB scanners to scan barcodes.

Using the inventory management features

Inventory Register

The first step is to let the platform know what the inventories are. Details can include attributes such as the product’s name, brand, purchase date, location, costs, images, etc. These attributes are customizable, so you can capture any attribute that you want.

There are several ways to add your inventory records to the platform. They include form filling from either the web browser or the smartphone app, CSV import, and import from other platforms such as QuickBooks, Square, or Shopify.

The quickest way to get started is by importing the inventory records from a CSV spreadsheet. Make sure that the inventory records have location data as they get used during inventory adjustments and transfers. See inventory locations below.

Inventory Locations

The platform can track inventory across multiple locations and show the stock levels from each location.

Before it does that, you need to make it aware of the locations that your inventories use.

Your inventory records should also have the same location data as part of their location attributes.

Inventory Adjustments

You can increment or decrement stock levels and capture relevant customizable data when doing so.

Each historical adjustment made can be viewed from the Inventory Reduction or Inventory Increment page.

To avoid stockout problems, you can set up email notifications, push notifications, or webhooks that get triggered when a stock level falls below a defined threshold.

Inventories can also be bundled such that when an adjustment is made, all the stock levels of the items that belong to the bundle get adjusted with various amounts according to your specification.

Inventory Transfers

In cases where inventories need to be moved from one location to another, use the inventory transfers feature to capture the transaction details. The platform will work out the stock level adjustments automatically.

These details can be viewed on the Inventory Transfers page.

Inventory Stock-takes

With inventory stock-takes (stock counting) you can manually identify stock-level discrepancies and fix them before they lead to problems such as stockouts, overstocking and dead stocks.

What next?

As you make inventory adjustments, the Inventory section of the platform will show a current up-to-date overview of all the inventory stock levels.

You can change how the data gets formatted and presented on the table or what gets displayed on it, group alike records, search for records, export them, format them, set up various notifications, sync with other platforms e.g. Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, and generate custom reports.

If you’re part of a team, you can add other team members as sub-users and assign them permission to access certain features.