Some suggestions
Howdy! Having used IL for the last 3 years I wanted to put out a list of some upgrades that I would love to see for the platform. Some are repeats of previous suggestions, some are the same:
1. We NEED the ability to manually enter sales. I understand your platform is Amazon (.us) centric. I get it. You don't have access to ebay or other 3P marketplaces. That's fine. But we NEED to be able to manually enter sales from other sales channels for our recordkeeping. The main benefit to this would be to ACCURATELY reflect inventory and COGS. Some of my suppliers sell to me in other currencies which fluctuate over time when converted to USD. But over time, when I make sales on other platforms, I need to lock in the COG for the unit I sold from the batch I sold it from, which may be a different COG than another batch. Simply lowering my purchase/restock quantity does NOT provide accurate recordkeeping - it just creates a larger headache. In addition to tracking COGS and income it would also allow us to input fees and shipping costs and include those directly in the P&L. This general feature has been requested multiple times.
2. Reports-Inventory Valuation - We need to be able to get more information by clicking on items from this list. There is no hyperlinking here which seems silly. If I have an item in inventory showing up on the report, why should I have to copy/paste the MSKU from this screen to the inventory overview/FBA/MFN screens to dig deeper? It should be as easy as clicking on the item from this report.
3. Disposition Management - The platform is for managing inventory so there should be a way for me to be able to dispose of inventory in the system. I have a couple of products that have expired that are in stock locally (not at Amazon). Others that have been replaced with newer versions. I need a means to dispose of a quantity directly from my inventory and for the system to include those COGS in my P&L statement.
4. Closed batches - it would be useful for us to be able to copy/paste Amazon shipment IDs into the closed batches for easier cross referencing. Even if the system can't do this automatically, a manual process would be great. This would come in handy when trying to remember which IL batch was sent to Amazon using the Shipment ID information provided by amazon. The "Name" feature would be of more use if it was amazon shipment ID info. This could then help to link between Closed batches and Inbound Shipping information under "Batch Name" where you could see costs and contents.
5. Reports-Supplier Profitability - This needs to link to a consolidated list of the items you sold from said supplier. It's good to know how many units sold from a particular supplier, but if you get multiple items from the same supplier, it would be nice to just click on the supplier name and there is the list of each item and the number of units per line. This would also apply to category profitability, however..
6. Reports-Category Profitability - This is only as useful as it is accurate. Amazon categories are terribly inaccurate much of the time. This would almost be better if we could assign the categories ourselves rather than rely on the ones provided by amazon, or at least to be able to override them.
7. Reports-Tags - It would be a great benefit to be able to search by tags and get reports on profitability.
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Official comment
Hi there, Walter!
Thank you so much for reaching out and for providing such insightful feedback!
Some of your suggestions, specifically the ability to add sales from other platforms and track disposals for items kept locally, are already available within InventoryLab! The Other Income page can be used to add sales information for items sold outside of Amazon, and the Unlisted Inventory page can help track disposals of local inventory. :)
You are not alone in wanting the capability to get a list of items that fall under each Supplier in the Supplier Profitability Report! This suggestion is already open to our development! Each user suggestion is reviewed by our product and development team to see if it fits within our roadmap to be added either as a new feature or an enhancement to an existing feature.
I'm going to reach out to you in a separate email to provide you with more details on some of your other suggestions so that our team can look at these as well.
Keep an eye on your inbox. :)
Thank you again for your feedback!
Comment actions -
I did recieve your email and I appreciate the information you provided. To make things more clear, and for transparency with other users, I would like to respond here:
1. The option mentioned was to use two different features for recording other sales - Other Income and Other Expenses. This is a multi-step, inefficient process. This requires putting in data for the same transaction twice, and without the granularity that should be a feature of a business tracking software solution, and it only provides part of what is needed.
There should be a section for inputting a sale from another platform that will ultimately end up showing on the Accounting - Merchant Sales screen and allow for all the same information to be recorded. At a minimum recording a sale should include the following information provided via manual input:- Sales date
- Marketplace
- Order Number
- ASIN sold (selected from a search bar) - this will provide the cogs from the current batch in inventory and record the unit being removed from inventory from the correct chronological location.
- Item Price
- Shipping Paid by Customer
- Tax
- Other Fees
- Net
The biggest feature from this is the CORRECT method for tracking inventory sold. The offer currently suggested by IL is to simply remove one inventory item from your purchase record in order to keep your inventory reconciled correctly, which again is NOT a good method as described previously. Second, this can help to consolidate income and fees apples-to-apples in the P&L report. The fees could be done as an "+add fee to this transaction" where you would categorize each one, as needed, in a single record. This is an essential function for managing inventory and sales for a business.
2. Not currently available, but you will bring it up with the team. Appreciated.3. Response "For items kept within your local inventory, you can track disposals using the Unlisted Inventory page. This can be done by manually removing the quantity of an item from Unlisted Inventory and using the Adjustment Note to indicate that the removal is due to a disposal or product rotation. More information on this process can be found here."
Again, this suggestion is a multi step process -
- first you have to open your MFN inventory and reduce the amount available from a purchase
- then open unlisted inventory and add that same amount back into this inventory, remembering to use all the same dates and suppliers and COGS
- then make an adjustment in the ledger.
This should be something like a button on the Disposition Manager - "Inventory Disposal" which automatically makes the transfer between inventories and attaches the notes in a single step. This could also be built into the sales suggestion in step 1 where you could select from Marketplaces you have set, including MFN Inventory, and do the process from there.
4. Not currently available, but will recommend to the team. Appreciated.5. Not currently available, but already a suggestion.
6. Response "this would not likely be something we would pursue mainly due to how this could lead to discrepancies in the case that Amazon recategorizes an item and the system has no way to automatically update it." That is understood, but then there should be a means to have "Amazon Category" and "Seller Category". I sell games and toys - they are CONSTANTLY not categorized correctly. I need my own method to be able to make categories for reporting purposes. Tags could be the way to go if you tag items with categories, but that still needs a report made based on tags.
7. Tag reports - covered above
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