[RetailEdge Moderator]

1. Receiving and POs are considered a temporary holding areas (think scratchpads). Item pricing, and Quantities are not put into inventory until they are received. When you create an item in Receiving or on a PO we do add them to inventory with 0 quantity first so that they can be reused for other POs, sales, etc. This allows for pre-sales and pre-season reorders. If someone creates an item by mistake we do not want to have these items sitting in inventory. So if the item has not be received yet when it is deleted on a PO or in Receiving we will remove it from inventory. This actually was created in response to the number of people making mistakes. Especially where they were using item matrixes and were creating multiple items at once.

Although the items on a PO or in Receiving are not actually in inventory they are linked to the inventory. So if I change a description or SKU for instance, the change is instantly made to the inventory item. This can be helpful for items that you might not know the SKU for or are using UPCs and don't have the number until the item arrives. When you have it, just change it in receiving and you also update the inventory with the new number. The exception fields are quantity, pricing and Vendor fields. The pricing and quantity you typically would not updated until the product arrives (yes there are exceptions). The vendor field is independent of the inventory and allows RetailEdge to have a preferred vendor that will not get over written during the update. But the record is kept of the received vendor during the update process.

Obviously this approach can have some drawbacks. For instance you can print tags for items that get deleted but then they won't scan because the item does not exist. But for the most part it works pretty well

2. We typically don't want people adding items directly to inventory. There are reasons to enter items directly into inventory (department SKUs, non-stock items, first time inventory entry, etc.) However, for most stock inventory going through receiving or POs/receiving is the best way to do it. It keeps a historical record of what was received when and it updates average cost. This is very important since the entire inventories valuation is based on average cost.

3. Here is a way to copy an item in receiving or a PO through the Quick Lookup feature.

http://www.retailedge.com/phpBB/viewtop ... 681&p=2082