knowledge base

Adding explicit serial number support is on our wishlist, but unfortunately it’s not yet available.

In the meantime, if you're not already using sublocations, you could try using them to keep track of the serial numbers. This isn't exactly what it's designed for, but it’s worked well for a number of people. This same trick will also work for lot numbers, batch numbers, expiry dates, and so on. We recommend you enter expiry dates in a yyyymmdd format so that they can be sorted properly.

To turn on sublocations, make sure the option "Show Sublocation" is on under Company Settings --> Company --> Products & Inventory.

When you purchase/receive your products, you can type in the serial number into the Sublocation column. Then when you sell it, you can again pick it from that Sublocation column.  Then if you want to find what happened with that serial number, you can:

1.       View the History from the Inventory module.
2.       Click the “More” link to bring up the advanced search options.
3.       In “From Sublocation”, type in the serial number that you want to look up.
4.       Click Search.

From the History screen, you can also double click on the row to bring up any related orders. This will let you quickly look up who that particular item was sold to.

An alternative method for companies with high volumes of inventory

The above method can be very helpful for keeping your number of records down however for some companies with higher volumes of inventory and more specific tracking needs perhaps not ideal.  An alternative to the method described above is to set up your categories such that you can group your products (for reporting) and create a new product record for each individual serial number.  You can also duplicate the records using the copy button in the toolbar at the top of your record to save yourself time and effort in copying your items over (as below).

In this method you start with the largest groups and work your way down to the model number of the things you are tracking.  In the example below we have set up the main categories according to the type of product (carborator, gasket, headlamps etc.) and the next layers according to brand names.  The final layer addresses the model number of the products you have in stock and of course the serial number acts as the product item name/code.

This allows you to store your products in groupings based on their models and narrow your searches down so that you can see how many items you have available.  Sold or unusable items are deactivated so that they do not appear in active list.  What's more, if you have a barcode scanner which will read your serial barcodes you can use it to scan your serial numbers and identify your products in the sales order immediately rather than having to specify the correct location.

If you ever need to pull up a record that has been deactivated (because a customer has brought it back or you need to track it) you can do so by following the instructions available here:

http://www.inflowinventory.com/KnowledgeBase/questions/98/