raw materials

This will be the first in an ongoing series of posts that will be of interest to almost nobody, but will let me blow off steam about Checkout, the point-of-sale software we use.

When a new purchase order is opened (what is used to track inventory orders and receipt), it presents this friendly list of suppliers. You’ll have to take my word for the fact that navigating this list is, for our setup, brutally slow. (Consider the overall slowness of Checkout my biggest gripe, but I can’t really show it to you via a screenshot.)

But take a look at those “Needed Products” values. Look useless? It absolutely is. You can set up what you want your minimum stock for each product to be, and that and your inventory drives the numbers in this list. But if you have an extra product of one SKU, that will balance out a product under the minimum of another SKU. The more products you source from a supplier, the more useless this number becomes.

Seem like a small gripe? It is. I’ll try to come up with something better next time. (Want a big gripe? You can’t import or export the data in purchase orders. I’m in the middle of entering a purchase order of about 250 SKUs right now. Something I have to do every week. And just working with purchase orders makes the rest of Checkout go slower. Nothing fuels rage like having to spend an hour hand-entering data that would take a second to import.)