Inventory Invoicing Software

What Is Inventory Invoicing?

When you use an inventory management system for invoicing – you are using an inventory invoicing software. An invoice is a document that records a transaction between buyer and seller. When a seller creates an invoice for a customer, it includes company information, the invoice number, invoice date, itemized list of the purchases the customer has ordered, and others. This itemized list can be for services or products, or both. As a manufacturing or retail business, invoices will be for goods sold. The following are some of the basic functionalities that an inventory invoice system performs:

Inventory Management Software Features

Inventory Item Definition

A product or item is what exists in the inventory system. Usually, item code, description, selling cost, purchase price, discount, quantity, unit of measure, barcode and specification are the basic definition of an item that all inventory control system provides. Beyond the above, some inventory system also provides other columns to define items: model, color, country of origin, other costs, weight, length, height, width, category, asset account, and so on. If an inventory system allows you to edit these labels and add/remove columns then you can get better flexibility to define your inventory system.

Unit of Measure

The unit of measure for items depends on the type of inventory is kept. It is necessary the system should allow adding, removing, and editing units of measure according to the need.

Active and Archive Items

Sometimes, you may stop maintaining some of the items. For such items, you should able to archive them so that they will be kept aside from the view while you can still run the report on them. The system should provide the ability to view archived items and make them active if needed.

Inventory Configurations

Depending on the vendors, an inventory system may provide different types of configurations. Here are some of the basic configurations you may find in most of the system:

• You can define the rule for the item code and let the system generate the item code by auto-incrementing it.

• Enable or disable lot tracking. When you enable lot tracking, it expects to follow a certain user interaction flow.

• Show the only description or also specification in quote/invoice.

• Show country of origin in the quote/invoice.

• Hide some of the inventory item columns such as Weight, Length, Height, Width, Specification, Country of Origin, and Other Cost.

• Change the data input form labels for items.

Warehouse Locations

Businesses’ operations often need to handle multiple warehouse locations. This means the inventory management software must able to look up items across all warehouse locations, able to receive delivery or pickup from any locations, transfer stocks between locations. All the purchases and invoices must be able to track the inventory items.

Image for Items

For e-Commerce, you may want to maintain multiple images for your items. Datamoto allows you to upload up to 3 images per item.

Inventory Stock Alert

It is important for businesses to get alerted when stock runs low for items. The stock threshold could be set up at a global level — that is one stock threshold for all items or individual item level. When the stock level goes below the threshold then alerts are generated where you can covert an alert to purchase order. This helps uninterrupted inventory operations.

Manual Update of Stock

If you are managing a warehouse then you are familiar with that manual update of stock level is inevitable. Sometimes, items are misplaced, and other times it is hard to reconcile the actual count (or cycle count) and the count in the system. So, a manual update that can be audited is a required feature to run a warehouse smartly.

Update Inventory from Sales Order Fulfilment

The ability to split an order to deliver items in multiple batches as well as merge multiple orders to one shipment is a very important feature for order fulfillment. This feature optimizes the complex fulfillment process. It allows you to combine all the orders from the same customer if shipping addresses are matched. You can fulfill items from specific warehouses or specific lots and split the order if needed. You can also save the fulfillment and complete the pending fulfillment later. It generates invoices automatically and adjusts stock levels in the inventory. You can print the packing list and delivery note.

Update Inventory from Purchase Order Goods Receive

A good receive functionality allows you to record every good receive for POs and similarly, these received goods are automatically added to the inventory and recorded to a specific warehouse location.

• Received goods are automatically updated in the inventory and can be easily tracked

• Receive delivery multiple times on the same PO and generate a single bill

• Track the good receive transactions

• Generate printable good receive notes

Inventory Tracking

Inventory tracking is a large area that may include finding out the location of an item in the warehouse. But, here scope is limited and we are discussing tracking how your inventory items’ stock level affecting. Who is adding items in the inventory, who is picking up the items from the inventory? Having an audit trail of every addition or subcontract of an item’s stock level is a must for an advanced inventory system. It should tell you which purchase order delivery added the stock and who was the item receiver. Similarly, it should tell you whether there was a return of items from customers, or some scrap items are found. It should also tell you if you have manually updated the stock level after the cycle count. Inventory item tracking log should tell you who, when, why, and how much stock level is going up or down. Moreover, it should also tell you the quantities that are currently booked in purchase orders and sales orders but not received or fulfilled.

Lot Tracking

Every use case does not require inventory tracking using lot numbers. But some business use case especially for pharma or cosmetic — it may be required. In such cases, you should make sure you have the ability to add inventory stock according to the batch number. A number of items can have the same batch number. So, you can receive (from vendor) or fulfill (to customer) using batch number. This way, you can track the items by batches in your inventory.

Stock Transfer Between Warehouses

If you are a trader, distributor, wholesaler, or seller who maintains multiple warehouses then you may want to transfer inventory items from one warehouse to another. If you maintain batch or lot number then you may like to transfer items by lot and track the transfer. Transferring stocks between two warehouses is done through two separate transactions. First, an inventory management system allows you to create a transfer document where you can outline all the items, lots, and warehouses. Once you save the transfer document, it will deduct the items from the “from” warehouse but it will not yet add items to the destination warehouse. Once the transfer document is received by the destination warehouse, then the quantity for the destination warehouse will be automatically added.

Bundle/Kitting

Inventory Item Bundling or Kitting is a process in which individually separate but related items are grouped, packaged, and sold together as one unit. For example, in ordering a PC online, a customer may select memory, drives, peripherals, and software from several alternatives. The supplier then creates a customized kit that is assembled and shipped as one unit.

Imagine you are selling a deep water cleaning system and you forgot to include an O-ring in the package. The frustration drives at installation time are certainly going to affect your relationship with the customer. Similarly, for example, if you only want to sell items in dozen but you want to maintain your inventory in a “piece” unit then it becomes time-consuming to create an extra business process to handle it. Both of these use cases you can easily handle and save time by using Bundle/Kitting.

Bill of Materials

A bill of materials or product structure (sometimes bill of material, BOM, or associated list) is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product. An inventory management software with a bill of materials allows creating BoM for a product by adding items or raw materials and instruction notes. When products are produced these are added to the stock at hand whereas the stock levels of the items in the BoM are deducted.

API For Inventory

Datamoto supports APIs for inventory, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders, quote, and others. There is a limit to how many APIs can be called per day which can be adjusted according to the customer’s need. This is a very useful feature for e-Commerce.

Inventory Invoicing Solution Also Includes

VENDOR CATALOG

PURCHASE ORDER TO INVENTORY

A purchase order tracking system is a powerful tool. It keeps track of all purchases in one place by avoiding duplicates, tracking the arrival of deliveries, processing invoices and payments, and keeping inventory up to date. A purchase order software must provide purchase order creation and integrated with an invoice, quote, sales order processing, and inventory modules. A purchase order should also provide:

• Sales to purchase and purchase to sales order tracking
• Purchase order aggregation if they are for the same vendor
• Bill aggregation if they are for the same vendor and not yet paid
• Dropship purchase and sale
• Multi locations warehouse good receive from a Purchase Order
• Inventory alert to purchase order creation