This blog is part of the series of posts that talk about the April release of Brightpearl. There's a lot to cover, so I'm breaking it down into seven separate posts spread over a week. If you're not yet subscribed to our blog by email, now is the time! You'll get each post delivered directly to your inbox. Just click the link on the right ...
Inventory reporting
In this post I'm going to be covering inventory reporting. There are two main inventory reports, "summary" and "detail". The former shows you one line per product, and is a good report to use for stock takes and asset valuation. The latter shows one line per FIFO entry (FIFO is first-in-first-out; a stock costing mechanism explained fully here), which gives you full detail of when stock arrived and how much each item cost you.
Both reports now let you see information from any point in the past*, just open up the filter and choose a date. Since every single inventory movement is stored in a double entry fashion (just the same principle as double entry accounting), you can see stock values and stock levels for previous month and year end dates. Very handy if you missed that year end asset value for your accountant!
Also new on the inventory reports are columns for "allocated" and "on hand" quantities. This makes it really easy to see what inventory you actually have on hand to sell (or transfer to another store or warehouse) - just click the number for full detail of the product. When you're doing a stock take, you will need to watch out for inventory allocated; it may not be on the shelf - it may be in a box ready to ship to a customer. I'll be writing a blog specifically on stock taking next week.
If you want an inventory summary report with item locations, prices and other information (including product custom fields) then you can now filter the product list by warehouse. This gives extra columns on screen (location, reorder level and reorder quantity) and in the export to excel:
Click rather than hover to open main navigation
This release also saw an improvement to how you interact with the main navigation (i.e. the 'Customer', 'Sales' links at the top of the page). Now, you have to click to open the menu, instead of hovering your mouse over it as before.
The change came about through our one-on-one testing with current customers and new users. We found the hover was causing all kinds of niggles. Often, people would open the navigation accidentally when moving their mouse around the page, distracting them from their flow. People also struggled hovering their mouse in a relatively small area whilst busy trying to complete a task. Considering how much the navigation is used, these small niggles were pretty frustrating if they happened through the day.
With a click, we know for sure you meant to open the navigation. And once open, we don't hide it until you click somewhere else on the screen. It's a switch other sites have recently made (a recent one being Twitter). All in all, it gives you more control.
Keep your eyes open for updates next week on product custom fields, warehouse management and more!
Chris Tanner
Head of Product
Head of Product
* if your account has ever been on brightpearl version 2, you will only have retrospective inventory data available since you upgraded to v3 or v4; the main feature introduced in v3 was a double entry stock database which is needed for historical stock reporting.
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