Bulk Import Initial Stock Quantities

A stock take, or physical inventory, is the process of counting or measuring the stock at a company’s location or sub-location. Import your initial stock quantities simply as copying and pasting from Excel. To bulk import initial stock quantities, you will need to have an Excel file with your products and stock quantities. If you are migrating from Finale to another solution, you can typically export the stock file into a XLS format and then import it into Finale.

Bulk Import Initial Stock Quantities – basic

If you only have a single location and your products do not have lot or serial number tracking, you simply need a two-column Excel file where the first column is the product id, and the second column is the quantity. Although it is not used in the actual import, using an optional description column is helpful to allow you to make an easier association with the product.

Video Transcription

Hi. This is Chinh from Finale Inventory. In this session, I’m going to show you how to do a basic stock change, basically a bulk import of initial stock quantities from an Excel file. So, in this example, what I have here is three polo shirts, red, blue, and green. And right now, we have a quantity of zero. And this is a pretty common application when you first start your account with Finale. You want to import your stock levels. This is how you do it.

So, you only have one location and you’re not doing lot or serial number tracking; it’s a pretty basic file. Essentially, here it is as an example. It’s a three-column file, but really you only need two: the product ID and the quantity. And I put the description so that way, it’s just easier for us to remember what it is. So, all we do is create this two-column file, and I’ll just import all three for now. You go to Home, you go to Import/Export, and you click on the second link, Import New Batch Stock Change. Because we’re only importing one location, you select the location. In this case, we’ll make it M0, hit Next, and you paste it in. We have to assign Prod ID to Prod ID. The description isn’t really being used here; it’s just more for us to remember what product we’re talking about. The quantity has to be mapped. Now, these are in bold. So then now, we can update these records. We hit Commit. So, if we go back to our view stock, essentially that’s all it was. Essentially, now we have 10 red shirts, 12 blue shirts, and 5 green shirts. Thanks.

Advanced stock import (multi-location or lot/serial tracking)

If you keep stock at multiple locations or your product requires lot or serial number tracking, two additional columns are required in the Excel file. A sublocation column tags where the products are stored. Additionally, a lot id column is required to track the lot or serial number of the product.

Since there are multiple permutations, product ids may be listed in multiple rows in the Excel file. Although it is not used in the actual import, using an optional description column is helpful to allow you to make an easier association with the product.

Video Transcription

Hi. This is Chinh from Finale Inventory. In this session, we’re going to do an advanced stock change import for products stored in multiple locations or products that have lot and/or serial numbers, or both, where you have products contained in multi-locations, and they have lots associated with them. So, in this example, what we’re going to do is look at our inventory levels, using protein shakes as an example. We have three products: strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. If you look at the stock, the quantity in hand is zero. Now, we want to do a stock take and import them into Finale. You create an Excel file with a four-column format, and an optional fifth column for descriptions. The four mandatory columns are Product ID, Sublocation, Lot, and Quantity.

A couple of pointers:

1. The locations have to be set and defined in the facilities tab in application settings beforehand (in this case, M0 and C0).
2. The Lot tracking has to be turned on in the product tab in the application settings.

This was your file recorded from your stock take. You just copy and paste this in. Go into Home, click on Import/Export, and then Import New Batch Stock Change, selecting Multiple, because it is defined in one of the columns. You have Product ID, Corresponding Product ID, Descriptions as unassigned, Location, Lot ID, and Quantity. Hit Commit and we’re done.

Now, if we go back to our view stock screen, we have our chocolate shakes, strawberry shakes, and vanilla shakes. You see products stored in both M0 and C0 location for the chocolate protein shake. You get more details by clicking on the down arrow. For strawberry protein shake, we have 45 total units stored in M0 with varying lots. Finale is able to keep track of both lot information and also multi-location via the bulk import from Excel. If you have any questions, feel free to call me or email us.