Inventory management setup

This tutorial will cover the tasks needed to use Pilot to manage your inventory.

Topics covered:

  • Inventory Management Type
  • Priority
  • Intelligent reorder settings
  • Automatic PO Creation

Inventory management is one of the core features of Pilot. Your Point of Sale can be setup to automatically create purchase orders for orders received instore and online, create stocking orders to plan for future stocking needs and make sure that the products are ordered from the correct vendor when more than one vendor carries the same item.

  1. Your basic inventory management settings can be found under the tab Supplier Setup in your admin page. Once here you will see a list of your custom and managed suppliers. There are two important settings here, the inventory management type and the priority.

  2. For each supplier you can choose to turn inventory management off, use basic inventory management or Pro level inventory management.

  3. With Basic inventory management turned on the inventory for that supplier will be tracked. In addition purchase orders will be created automatically for orders that come in when there isn’t enough stock to fill that order. The Pro level goes one step further and enables Automatic Stocking Orders. A Min/Max level will be set for every single part from this supplier, based on your recent sales history and predicted future sales. Pilot will look at these values on a daily basis and automatically create purchase orders to keep the optimum level of inventory in stock.

  4. You can fine tune the automatic reorder settings by clicking the gear icon then the Stocking Orders tab. The goal of the optimum inventory calculation is to keep enough parts in stock to fill most orders, but not too much that you have money sitting on your shelves. Use the drop downs to select how long between reorders and to fine tune your MIN and MAX levels.

  5. Back to the supplier page there is one more crucial option, Priority. This determines which supplier will receive a purchase order when a product can be ordered from various suppliers. This is on a per supplier basis. The suppliers at the top have more priority over the ones below.