Why your till cannot find an item that is on your shelf — transcript

Play this as a presentation — one slide per step, with the same narration. Every word of every step is on this page.

This lesson is for you if a customer is standing at your counter holding something your till says does not exist. In about eleven minutes you will know the three genuinely different reasons that happens, how to tell which one you have got before the customer loses patience, and why the stock report your supervisor is reading can be right at the same time as your screen.

Step 1 — Know what the search actually asks for

After this step you will understand why an item can vanish from one screen and not another. When you type into Add Item, the counter does not simply search a catalogue. It sends your session’s location along with the search, and asks for stock-controlled items only where there is a live stock row at that exact location with a quantity above zero. Anything without stock at your location is filtered out before the list reaches you. Items that are not stock-controlled — services, charges, non-stock lines — are not filtered this way and always appear. So a missing item is nearly always a stock-controlled item, and nearly always a location question.

Reference: POS General — Branch Settings — what each tab actually reaches

Step 2 — Learn that the branch is not the location

After this step you will read a stock figure more carefully. Stock balances are kept per location, and your branch can have more than one. A stock report run for the company, or for the branch, adds those locations up. So head office can quote you eleven units in perfect good faith while the location your till is pointed at holds none of them — they are in the back room location, or the one the goods receipt landed in, or a location created for a promotion two years ago. The number is not wrong. It is answering a different question from the one your customer is asking.

Reference: Related Applets - Stock Balance — Overview

Step 3 — Know where stock lands when a document is finalised

After this step you will be able to explain how stock ends up somewhere nobody chose. When a document goes final, the location each stock line lands on is decided in order: the delivery location on the line if it has one, then the store on the line, then the store on the document header, and only if all three are empty, your branch’s main location. Four chances to be somewhere other than where you assumed, and the first three are set on individual documents rather than on your branch. That is the mechanism behind stock sitting in a location nobody uses — and behind an item your till cannot see.

Reference: Organization — Branch Details, Pick Pack, Extension and Marketplace

Step 4 — Rule out the third cause, which looks identical

After this step you will stop reporting a category filter as a stock problem. Your branch has an item category filter of its own, in the point of sale’s branch settings — eleven levels of category lists that say what this shop is allowed to sell. An item outside the filter is not hidden with a message; it is simply absent from the search, exactly as an out-of-stock item is. Two completely different causes, one identical symptom, and the only way to tell is to check. This is the cause people forget, and it is the one that produces the phrase “it works at their shop but not at ours”.

Reference: POS General — Branch Settings — what each tab actually reaches

Step 5 — Run the one-minute check, in this order

After this step you will have an answer rather than a theory. First, open the stock report and filter it to your own location, not your branch — if it shows nothing, it really is stock, and the question is where the goods went. Second, if your location shows stock, look at the item’s categories against the branch’s item category filter; if the item’s category is missing from the list, that is your answer. Third, if the item has stock at your location and passes the filter, the location your session opened with may not be the one you think, and that is worth reporting exactly as such.

Reference: POS General — Troubleshooting

Step 6 — Say the right thing when you report it

After this step your report will be actionable. Three sentences do it: the item code, the location code you checked and its quantity, and whether the same item comes up at another shop. Those three settle which of the causes it is without anybody having to log in and reproduce you. Avoid the phrase “the item is missing” on its own — it is the one report that cannot be acted on, because it is true of all three causes and distinguishes none of them. And if the customer is still waiting, sell what you can and put the rest on a separate document rather than holding the queue.

Reference: POS General — Troubleshooting

How the steps fit together

    flowchart TD
  s1["Step 1 — Know what the search actually asks for"]
  s2["Step 2 — Learn that the branch is not the location"]
  s3["Step 3 — Know where stock lands when a document is finalised"]
  s4["Step 4 — Rule out the third cause, which looks identical"]
  s5["Step 5 — Run the one-minute check, in this order"]
  s6["Step 6 — Say the right thing when you report it"]
  s1 --> s2
  s2 --> s3
  s3 --> s4
  s4 --> s5
  s5 --> s6
  

Check yourself

Three to five questions on what you just heard. Every correct answer links to the page that makes it correct, so you can check the source, not just the mark.

Next: Why your prices and your totals are not the other shop’s · Back to the series · Play this as a presentation