July 29, 2020 - CSI Works

How do I Keep Track of my Inventory if I Sell by weight?

Call Type: Pre-sale Support

Call Reported On: 01/02/19

Products supported: Variable Price Barcode Parser

Use Case:

Clover Sales Agent: My customer wants a label-printing scale.

CSI Works Support Agent: We do have a barcode-printing scale.

Merchant: We want a scale that produces a barcode that integrates with a POS system and helps keep track of our inventory. We already use an inventory system for the wholesale side of our business. We need the inventory to tell me how many pounds of meat we’ve sold by the end of the day, every day.

Solution Proposition:

CSI Works Support Agent: You’ll switch your POS to Clover?
We developed an app that sits on top of Clover in their app market. Our app allows the use of any label-printing scale with Clover that produces a barcode. We also sell CAS label-printing scales and Tor-rey label-printing scales, as well as a CAS scale that connects directly to a clover device.

Merchant: We already have a CAS barcode-printing scale.

CSI Works Support Agent: You can use this scale with Clover, without a physical connection. The scale will print labels and our Clover app will process the inventory during the transaction with the customer. Both devices can be in any two locations in the store.
The printed price-embedded barcode will have two pieces of information: the item identification code and the total price. Our clover app, Variable Price Barcode Parser, will understand this information and help do the transaction and inventory update easily.

CSI Works Support Agent: Clover itself has pretty basic inventory tracking so without additional apps, you can specify a certain amount of poundage of a product in the inventory and then with every transaction, Clover itself will deplete the inventory automatically with every purchase (except refunds).

Merchant: Our current POS, Shoppify, isn’t working because it doesn’t seem to integrate with our scales.

CSI Works Support Agent: No, Shoppify doesn’t integrate with scales. That’s the number two reason I see people switch to Clover. The only thing you would have to manually do in Clover is manually enter when you receive sellable material from your supplier, you have to do some addition and enter the new total poundage into your inventory.

Merchant: How about online orders? We take orders through Shopify.

CSI Works Support Agent: There’s no easy way, but the most common solution on Clover is to accept payment online and when they come to the store, give the person the merchandise and add a custom tender type; call it “Shopify Order” or “Uber Eats Order”, etc. Instead of taking the money from the customer again, change the tender type to count the order in the reports/inventory but allow the person to pay online and just get the merchandise.

Does my Barcode Scanner Have to be Purchased From Clover?

Call Type: Support Call

Products Discussed: Barcode Scanner

Problem Statement:

Merchant: Here is the scenario I am working with:

We use a Clover station 2018.
I have the item set up according to the instructions. I set up a few different items in the system.
I tried to utilize an external scanner (usb) and it would not work.

The external scanner seems to be stripping the leading character away, but when I scan the item in notepad and/or in Clover, the leading digit is there.

When I used the internal camera, the program worked just fine.

Solution:

CSI Works support: Is it possible that your external scanner is not purchased from Clover?

Merchant: I-is it that specific??

CSI Works Support: It has to be that specific. The built-in camera with a software scanner in the clover device can scan weight-embedded barcodes just fine, but a usb scanner not from clover works less like a linear camera and more like a keyboard, just outputting a string of numbers when it scans. Make sure to use a Clover barcode scanner for weight-embedded barcodes because other barcode scanners will not work. Fixed-price items work fine sometimes with non-clover scanners because you can enter their codes and serial numbers by keyboard, while the clover scanner will scan half the barcode to get the item code and then the other half of the barcode to get the weight or price.

Clover sells two scanners, one that is on a wire and you scan things with it; the other one is stationary so you can scan against it.

Merchant: So you’re telling me the built-in camera, which is a Clover-developed app, works just fine.

CSI Works support: So your external scanner is not from Clover?

Merchant: It is, it’s a Honeywell 2D image scanner, a little bit more sophisticated.

CSI Works support: I know it’s misleading because it works on fixed-price (and therefore fixed-barcode) items, but that’s only because fixed-price items are sufficient for keyboard entry, where as us, we’re putting a bit of a logic into it: only read this part of the barcode and then only read the next part of the barcode. That function is really breaking everything up, because we’re not really dealing with a scanner, we’re dealing with a keyboard.