Altru 3.11 New Feature: Merchandise Enhancements

I used to hate Yo Gabba Gabba. We wouldn't let my eldest daughter watch it; I just didn't get it. It’s likely the same thing our parents thought when H.R. Pufnstuf came on: why do we let our kids watch this stuff?

But recently I've had a change of heart. My 18 month old, can’t get enough of Yo Gabba Gabba. In particular, the song Hold Still; we listen to it multiple times each night before bed. And after repeatedly watching, I realized it was a near perfect allegory for our product development approach. However, instead of wiggling 4 times and stopping, we sprint 4 times and stop. In fact, our bimonthly releases are internally called Stops.

With this Augusts’ 3.11 release of Altru, aka Stop 4, we are adding the fruits of 4 sessions of wiggles. Today, we’ll take a look at the work done to enhance our merchandise story.

Physical Worksheet for Doing Inventory Counts

Is it time for an inventory audit? Print out this handy worksheet, and you can walk around to do an honest count of the inventory on hand. Even though you can print a column for quantity on hand, we recommend leaving it off, so that you can an unbiased count of units on the shelf.

Merchandise Physical Count Batch

Once we are done with the Merchandise Physical Count Worksheet, this is where we upload the results back into Altru. This can be accessed in Merchandise>Update inventory. On this screen, click Add to create a new batch. Then, in the template drop-down, choose Merchandise Physical count batch. Choose the item and put in the count from the worksheet.

Merchandise Report Enhancements

We've added some additional fields and filter drop-downs to the Merchandise Sales report.

One I really appreciate is being able to filter on Vendor. Thinking about dropping a vendor? Maybe it is a pain to deal with them or you have to go out of your way to reorder stock. Run this report and filter on Vendor to see just how much impact they are having on your bottom line. The annoyance might actually be worth it if they are bringing in the sales.

You can now also group the results by department and category. This provides a great way to see which departments are doing well. Your clothing department might be going gangbusters; time to expand.

This report becomes even more useful when we add fields for the SKU, Margin, Profit, % of Profit, and Cost of Sales. To make room for these additional fields, we removed the columns for Department and Category, since you can now use the Group By drop-down to massage the report to get this info.

So, now that 3.11 is just a week or so away, we are preparing to wiggle some really cool stuff out for 3.12.

To learn more about 3.11, join us for training today at 2 pm.