Stop Leaking Cash: Taking Control of Your Purchase Order Data
If you're entering purchase orders in Shopify (or any POS) without a system, your inventory numbers are lying to you.
Every buying decision you make (what to order, when, and how much cash to commit) is riding on those numbers. Most retailers don't discover the damage to their bottom line until it shows up as bloated inventory, missed markdowns, or a cash crunch they never saw coming.
Management One retail coaches Melanie Melton and Alex Mentzer hosted a live, hands-on workshop to fix this for good. This isn't another webinar you simply watch. Our coaches will walk you through the proven process we use with hundreds of independent retailers and expose the costly mistakes they see every week.
What you'll take away:
The hidden ways PO errors quietly drain your cash flow, and how to spot them before they compound.
The most expensive PO mistakes retailers make, straight from a coach who sees them every week
Numbers you can finally trust when it's time to commit real dollars to your next buy.
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Indie Insights Live — M1 retail coaches Melanie Melton and Alex Mentzer break down purchase orders in Shopify, from planning your cash to receiving, canceling, and tracking what's on order.
Featuring: Melanie Melton & Alex Mentzer, Management One Retail Coaches
Host: Management One
Aired: September 10, 2026
Nico: Hello, everyone! As you can tell, I am not Dane Cohen. Dane is our usual host here for Indie Insights Live, and he's actually in New York City at the Magic and Coterie show, so he'll be hitting the main stage tomorrow. If you happen to be in the area, go check out Dane on the main stage. Before we get into our topic today, though, as usual every week, we want this to be an interactive session, so use the Q&A button right down there at the bottom. Please submit your questions. I'm willing to bet we have a lot here. So submit them right down at the bottom, and we will answer them live. If you do need to leave early, we understand retailers lead very busy lives, so we are recording this, and we are going to send out a recording at the end. So, our mission here at Management One, obviously, is to maximize the available cash in your retail store, and that really begins, the first stage in that process begins at the moment you purchase your goods. I mean, that cash is flowing right out of your business, and the clock is officially ticking to bring it back in, so that you can reinvest in more goods, marketing, staff, store upgrades, whatever it is you need to grow your business. So, it's such a critical process, but it's also the most inefficiently tracked, and with a system like Shopify, especially this year, with all the difficulty with the Stocky deprecation, the introduction of a new purchase order module, it's gotten a little bit more difficult. Fortunately we've got you covered there. So, our free Retail ORBIT app on Shopify and our on-order tracking for purchase orders makes it a lot easier for you. So, we actually invited two of our retail coaches, Melanie Melton and Alex Mentzer, to kind of dive under the hood and just give you some tips, tricks, best practices, just to help you navigate the process of purchase orders. So, without further ado, I will turn it over to our coaches here.
Melanie Melton: Awesome. Thank you, Nico. Welcome, everybody. We're excited for this one today. This is a hot topic, purchase orders, so we're gonna be chit-chatting about why they matter, why they're important, how we use them here at Management One, and then also go into a demo of creating and receiving purchase orders in Shopify. I know this has been asked for, and I've chatted with many of you over the last couple months, walking you through the new process. And so hopefully we can get some questions answered, some mysteries solved, and show you the best process in Shopify. And just want to let you know, too, we've created a guide for receiving and entering purchase orders. Everyone will get a copy of that. And as things change with Shopify, as Shopify comes out with new capabilities, we'll be sure to update you on that, and be sure to update the guide. So, Alex, thanks for hanging out with me today.
Alex Mentzer: For sure, I love Shopify, it's my favorite thing. I dream about it every day.
Melanie Melton: Literally, like, I feel.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, sometimes it's a nightmare, and sometimes it's a friendly dream, but yeah, it's, it's just changed retail for many ways, so I'm excited to dive into it and the importance of how purchase orders in Shopify can affect your business.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely. I mean, as Alex said, we're in Shopify every single day. We are helping our clients, not just in Retail ORBIT, but we go into their Shopify a lot, and we have really grown to like the system. It's, you know, it sometimes was a love-hate in the past. I've grown to really like Shopify, and it's just not an average day if we're not in Shopify poking around. So if you guys ever have any other Shopify questions, too, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. Hi, Tracy! So, Tracy, yes, you will want to catch the first part of this. Once I go into the demo, which will be my last slide here, that part won't necessarily apply to you, since you, I know you're on a different point of sale. But this first part will be really helpful to hear. So, we're gonna first go through and just talk about purchase orders and why they matter and why they're important. I was a retailer, I had my own boutique, and I know that when you get back from market and you have a stack of POs to enter into your system, it can feel really overwhelming. But it is such a good use of time, whether you can outsource it or give it to somebody on your staff, who wants a couple extra hours that can help you out. It is such an important part of managing your business. Inventory is your biggest expense, and we have all of these great reports to categorize all of our other expenses. Payroll, rent, dues and subscriptions, meals, any travel, everything. We are always staying on top of those expenses and making sure they're in line. This is how we keep track of how much we're spending in our biggest category, your inventory. So, it's incredibly important. You do not want to steer the ship blind. We really can't sacrifice or leave any cash on the table. This is, this is a big one. So, we're gonna kick this off with our first topic, planning your cash. POs equal visibility. So, Alex, what is, you know, when you first start with a planning client, you know, how are you kind of planning out that next year for them, in terms of cash flow?
Alex Mentzer: I mean, we're definitely looking at what's our expected inflow. We're trying to plan how much revenue we need to generate, and based on that revenue, and trying to find a break-even, and make sure we're covering all those expenses, we know we're gonna have to buy a certain amount of inventory to cover that. So, we really want to get visibility on what's coming in the near future, so that I can get a handle on short-term cash flow, and then, really, that can lead us down long-term, where we need to make the right investments, where we need to allocate that cash. To hit those revenue goals.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely. It's hugely important in planning out your cash flow for the next year. We know here we want to hit a certain amount of sales, right? And we have a sales goal planned for you each month. And it's simple math. It's sales minus your average monthly expenses, minus how much you're spending that month on new inventory is your total cash flow. We can back out debt payments, loan payments. But without knowing how much you've committed to, it's really hard to do that, and it's really hard to plan for those months where we know cash might be a little tight. So having those POs in is helpful. Also, I know I've worked with new clients before where they come to us and they've already done their entire next season's buy. And if I don't have purchase orders to see what they've already committed to prior to working with us, it's, it's a little nerve-wracking, right? Like, we want to make sure we're planning them to succeed, and planning them to hit the right sales, so we have to know how much we've already booked. So, this one is interesting. This is a, this is what I loved about purchase orders. I was a client of Management One, so not just for budgeting purposes. But also for clienteling. So, I really wanted my managers, my staff, to know what was coming each month from our top vendors. So, boutiques. I mean, I have a love for boutiques, obviously, but I love it because we really have the freedom to give people, a really special customer experience in the store, and product knowledge is a huge part of that customer experience. So, when you allow your staff to have more knowledge about what's coming, they can speak to customers in a more confident way. So, like, let's say a customer comes in, and they're trying on all this denim, and they're just not finding something that works for them that day. They're saying, oh, I just, you know, I'm tall, I really need, like, a long, I need a longer style. I'm just not really into these cropped jeans. If your manager can then go look at the purchase orders and see when the next denim shipment is coming, and there might be a style in there that you think will work really well for that customer. Write their number down, call them when it arrives. You've given that customer a really good personal experience, and you've allowed the visibility into those future orders to make that happen. So, this was a big one for me at my store, and something I really encourage people to utilize POs for, not just for budgeting, but to just really know what's coming in.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, and from me and my experience as a head inventory planner and buyer, this really helped build out a marketing calendar of where are my buys and where my cash is being allocated, and then I knew that I need to sell X amount of inventory to really get my cash out of that, so it could really help me set up marketing initiatives in the future instead of getting caught up in the moment, and trying to, you know, build it in the moment. It just takes, it takes more effort to do that, but if you can kind of plan those ahead. It becomes a lot easier.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely. So this was a big one. Keeping your open to buy honest, preventing overbuying. So, we know we gotta buy the right amount. We gotta buy the right amount, we gotta feed the good areas that are performing well. We will always encourage you to react and buy more where it's needed. But when we're planning out the next 12 months of what your store's gonna look like, pre-booking, we gotta make sure that we stay within the budget. It's always easier to go out and find more goods than it is to have to offload excess goods. So, we gotta make sure we're staying within our buying budget. It is there for a reason. It is there to promote the sales you need to make and the cash flow we need coming into the bank to cover our expenses. So, this is a given, but it's super helpful, especially when you, if you are someone who goes to market, and maybe you just take notes. So, I have a couple clients who will go to market, they'll take notes, they'll put them in as, like, almost like a wish list, right? These are the things we want to get. Let's see what our budget looks like. When this updates, and so the next day, they'll pull their budget, and they'll be like, oh, we're way over in jackets, okay, we need to make some cuts. So they'll go through, and they'll pick, okay, which styles can we live without? And it just sets them up for success!
Alex Mentzer: I think my point on that, too, is not hiding those, you know, being, like, being honest about where you did overbuy, and if those cuts aren't being made, or you made it, you were excited about something, making that investment, then let's adjust the plan, let's take that into account and say, alright, we've got to sell X amount now, instead of accepting that it was overbought, we can change the narrative, and so always being honest when you're excited about those investments.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely, that's a really good point. It's not always a terrible thing, but we definitely want to plan ahead for it. So this is a big one. Inflow and buying, it's not just about the dollars being spent, it's about the timing. It's about making sure that you're getting the goods ahead of your peak season and your best performing months. I actually had two calls today where I had the exact same call-out with clients, and that was noticing a pattern in their sweaters last fall. And I actually see this a lot. I'll see patterns for the previous year where the sweater inventory for the store climbed between November and December. So they had more sweaters on December 1st than they had on November 1st. But November saw way better sweater sales. Last year than December did. So, that's an inflow problem. We're not receiving the goods soon enough, so we can capitalize on the full potential of that category. So that is something that we plan for. We are planning for you to get those sweaters in so that we know, like, our planners are spotting for opportunity. If they see that last year you started October with $20,000 in sweaters and you sold 19, well, that means that everything you were putting out on the floor was moving, and we probably could have sold more had we been prepared and had more inventory at the start of the month. We factor that into your plans. We factor that into your planned inflow. If you ordered it, PO it. You want to talk about how important this is, Alex?
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, sure. I think, I think the, you know, especially lately, as we're going into a new season, and there's just this changeover, and we're kind of, there's these orders are starting to pile up and add up to more than we are expecting to come in, you start to tie up your cash in inventory and miss out on opportunities. So, definitely, you know, a good example is denim, for some clients, it's a little soft this fall so far, but bottoms, other bottoms, really increasing spend the trend spring and summer, that's continuing into fall. But because so much extra cash was tied up into these POs and into denim, didn't have that visibility on it. So now we don't have the right amount of cash to go and chase and really fill into bottoms where that class is trending in a better direction, and we can take advantage of that opportunity. So, you know, having that visibility is always gonna. Give you that opportunity, and give you more time to cancel orders if you need to.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely. Yeah, keeping the POs clean and current, it affects your budget. I mean, if you know that something that was supposed to come in October has now been canceled, you gotta clean it up. You gotta go in and cancel that order out of your purchase orders, otherwise it's gonna look like those goods are still coming, and they are factored into your budget. So making sure you are constantly doing a sweep of your purchase orders, and keeping them very clean, and, making sure everything that's remaining on order is truly coming will serve you well. And we do have a little box, a little inflow box on the merchandise plan, that I always feared when I was a client, because it held me accountable, and if we, if I started the month with a certain amount on order, and then I way over-received. That little box is where we can monitor that. So, I've had calls with clients where, you know, they'll say, how did I get into this situation where I just have way too much inventory at the start of the month? And I'll go back and look at that box for the last 3 months, and I'll say, well, you told us you had $50,000 on order. You actually received 90. So where did those, where did those goods come from? Were they not in purchase orders before? Did we not put them in until the month that they were coming in? Were there a bunch of future goods that shipped way early? Because that's also going to affect cash flow, and it's going to affect how your floor looks today. So, making sure that we keep our purchase orders nice and cleaned up is extremely important.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, I'd say we're not obtuse to the many hats that retailers wear, and that time is precious, and being on the floor and working with customers is definitely a priority every day, and probably takes up all the bandwidth you have. My discipline in my life has always been to schedule time, to really block out time, make sure I have staff coverage so that I have time every week to get caught up on those. Maybe it's not an everyday thing, but blocking out time in your life to get your POs in order is a discipline that you have to exercise. It takes time, but blocking out that time will help you know, create that kind of structure that you want.
Melanie Melton: Very much. Good point. I know when I was always at my store, there was no chance I was sitting down in my office and getting anything done, because I wanted to do other things. I wanted to talk to customers, I wanted to be merchandising, I wanted to be out where all the energy was. So, I really had to make sure I planned that time. And I am completely, like, I was not perfect when it came to POs. Like, I always think, man, if I could do things over. But what I do know is how incredibly important it is for cash flow, and so I just try and help my clients, stay on it so that we can guide you to the, you know, the best way possible. But it is, it's hard. It's hard to keep up with, for sure. And it also really helps with vendor accountability. So, this goes hand-in-hand with keeping them clean. So, making sure that an order that has not arrived, and it is past its cancel date. You have the right to cancel that order, and if it's going to not serve your store well at that point in time, and you're ready to cancel it, you can cancel it. So, making sure that vendors are shipping on time is incredibly important.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, that has kind of shifted. I'd say, in post-COVID life, vendors are less upfront about cancellations, and things are definitely shipping later than they expect. So, if something comes in late, you want it, don't be afraid to ask a little bit back on that. You're taking it off their books for them, you're doing them a favor, and so they really should be more accommodating to you. So, my advice to my clients is always, they want your money more than they want you to be nice to them.
Melanie Melton: Yeah.
Alex Mentzer: Don't be afraid to just question some of their processes, alright?
Melanie Melton: Yeah, yep, 100%. Okay, so we are now going to get into our Shopify demo. So we are well aware that Shopify has brought forth many changes, in terms of purchase orders, and so there have been a lot of questions going along with those changes, and we just want to help the best way we can. We have been learning on the go, just like all of you. This is new to us. But we have been really in the thick of it the last few months, and we are hoping we can get some of these questions answered. In terms of, you know, the best process going forward. So, this next part is going to be for those of you that are on Shopify, using the native Shopify purchase orders. Maybe you were with Stocky once before, maybe you're new, maybe you're just getting started, or just need a how-to on Shopify purchase orders. So, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen, and we are going to dive into this. Okay, Alex, is this good? Is it coming across?
Alex Mentzer: Yes.
Melanie Melton: Okay, awesome. Alright, so this is our demo store, and I'm gonna walk you guys through, creating a purchase order first, and then we are going to receive a couple, and go through a couple different scenarios, because we know not everything always gets there at once, so we're gonna walk through best practices for that. So, the biggest thing to understand about Shopify when it comes to purchase orders is that Shopify is treating any goods you purchase as a transfer. A transfer from the vendor to your store. So where the goods actually get received is through transfers. Purchase orders, so there's two sections here under products. There's Purchase Orders, and there's transfers. Retail ORBIT, if you're a client of ours, Retail ORBIT actually is reading your data in the transfer section, not the Purchase Order section. However, best practice is to always create a PO first, okay, and link it to a transfer record. The purchase order is, like, the master document. This is where you're gonna see, the cost per item, any terms that you have with the vendor, any notes on that order, anything, that you need to know ahead of receiving. The purchase order, I would treat that as your master doc. So let's say you're back from market, and you've got some orders to enter. So, first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go to Products, Purchase Orders, and we're gonna create a purchase order. Now, with Shopify. If you were using Stocky before, all of your suppliers did not transfer over to Shopify. So anytime you were entering an order for the first time from a particular vendor, you need to enter that vendor as a supplier in here. So, this is different than the vendors that you have in the products, like, actual products section of Shopify. This is a supplier, and you have to add it here. So eventually, when you've created a bunch of purchase orders, all of your suppliers will probably pop up. If you need to create a new one, you would just go here to create a supplier and enter the company name, and then you can enter any other information that you want on this record. That is up to you, we just need the supplier name. And then you can enter your payment terms here. So, for this sake, I'm just gonna use an existing supplier, Snowboard Co. And it is going to come to the shop location. So, if you're a multi-location store, this is where you would select which store this purchase order is for. So then, once you've got your vendor and your store location on there, you're gonna go ahead and add your products. So, these products have already been created in Shopify at this point, so you likely have created draft products, for each item, so if these are brand new products you've never stocked before, you've created the product first, and it's in draft mode, and you should be able to search it and find it here. So for the sake of this demo, I'm just gonna select a couple snowboards here. I'm gonna add it to the PO. So, typically, you'll probably have a supplier SKU on the product, so that will pop up here in this box. You can enter your quantities that you've ordered, and then your cost value of that product should automatically populate here. So, that's really it. That's adding the products to the PO. Now, there's a couple other things you can do over here. So, this would not be for Management One purposes, this is for your own records. And more info is better. So, if you have a reference number from the vendor, so maybe this is a PO number, an invoice number, something, you know, maybe your own PO number that you've created, you'll want to put that here. And then, any notes. So, the biggest thing that we have heard from you guys, or the biggest frustration, and we do believe this feature will be coming in the future, but there is no place to put a ship date and a cancel date on here. So I will show you, on the transfers, that is where you can put your expected arrival date. And you can go ahead and set the expected arrival date as the cancel date, so you can quickly search and see what is coming due, or what's near cancellation. But you could also put it in the notes here. So, you could put this as a 10/1, 10/31 cancel, and then you can also utilize any tags. So you can search all of your purchase orders by tag. Shopify loves tags. This is a different tag than, like, a product tag. So this tag is not, is really just used for purchase order organization. So let's just say you are a business who, launches themed collections. So let's say you have a Halloween collection you're getting ready to launch. And you want to go in and make sure that all of your orders for that launch have arrived, or they've at least shipped. So, you would go into tags, and any order for that collection would get a tag of Halloween. And this way, you know all of the orders that are coming in that are going to be part of that collection launch. So that's just an example of how you can utilize tags. So once you have all your info, you've spot checked, you've made sure that your subtotal here matches the order, so $600 is what we committed to the vendor, we're gonna hit save. So, the purchase order is saved, it is now in draft mode, we want to take it a step further and mark it as ordered. So, once it's marked as ordered, we're now going to link it to a transfer. The transfer is where we're actually telling Shopify that this stuff is coming in. So, you click Create Transfer, and this is all going to be in the guide we're going to send you guys to. And now we are in a transfer record. This is actually where Shopify is talking to Retail ORBIT. So this is where we're seeing your on-order. It has to be in a transfer record, and it has to say in progress at the top. So right now, it's gonna link to a transfer in draft mode. You have to take it one step further again and hit mark as in transit. So now, this order is officially on the books. Now, you have to set an expected arrival date so that we know which month you've allocated these funds for. So, this one would get, again, with that 10/31 cancel, hit 10/31, and hit save. So, now we know that this is an October order, and it will come out of your October budget. If you forget, if this expected arrival date is left blank, just know that this order's gonna show up in the current month's on-order. So if you ever pull up your plan and your current on-order looks really inflated, this is the first place I would go look. I would pull up transfers and make sure that everything has a proper expected arrival, because if they're blank, you might have orders for December that are showing on order for this month. Julie has a question. If it comes in early or late, will that mess with the expected arrival? So if it comes in early, it is going to come out of your on-order, and it's going to go into your receiving. So you mark it as received, and it's going to go into your net inflow for that month. And then, if it comes in late, so if it comes in late, it is going to still show on order in the current month. So, like, let's say it was due, by 8/31. We're now on September 10th, and that order is still open. You don't have to go in and change the expected date, you can if you want, for your own process, but if it's a late order, it will always roll over to the current month that we are in. So it will still show that it is an open order until you go in and mark it either received or canceled. So, this is on order now, we've got our expected arrival date. Now, let's walk through a couple receiving scenarios. So I have got a couple, I pre-made a few, too, so we'll go through and do a couple scenarios. But first, we're just gonna pretend that this vendor is on it, everything's shipped as it should, looks good, we just have to receive this entire order. So, when the order comes in, you're gonna go to Transfers, and I'm gonna go to this one. This is the one we just did together. So. We want to receive this whole order, but first we want to spot check and just make sure everything looks good. One thing to know about Shopify, and you'll notice, transfer record does not have cost. The only place you can see the cost of each item is by going to the PO number down here. So, they will always link the two together, so a transfer and a PO will always be easy to toggle between. So I recommend going down here to the PO number and spot checking and making sure that you are charged $600 for this order. You can also click the PO number, and it will take you to the PO. So you can spot check everything.
Alex Mentzer: One note I'll make on that is, if it's a product you're reordering, and the cost has changed, updating the cost within the purchase order will not go in and override the actual product cost within Shopify. So you will have to change that, on the product or variant level, before the PO, just so you know, because, you know, for a cost of goods sold, you're going to want to have that be correct.
Melanie Melton: That's a very good call-out. So any changes to cost or retail, for that matter, need to be made on the actual product itself. So what, if you, if everything looks good, you want to go back to the transfer to receive it, you just click over here on Linked Transfer, and it'll take you right back. And then we're gonna hit receive items, and we know all of these are good. It's gonna default to accepting each one, and we have to tell it how many we're accepting. So in this case, the vendor shipped complete. We got 2 of each. 2 of 2, and we're gonna hit Save. You also, as a shortcut, could just hit Accept All. And if you accept all, they've all now been accepted. We have rejected none. We've added 2 to each one of these products in our Shopify inventory. And now this transfer record says transferred, which means we're now seeing it as a receiving on your plan. So that is.
Alex Mentzer: There was a question about the barcode button down right there about its use case, right, next to the expected arrival date.
Melanie Melton: If you, I think this is gonna be if you have, like, if you utilize barcodes from another system, or, like, if you want to use the vendor's barcode, I think you can put that here. Yeah.
Alex Mentzer: For shipment purposes, like, if they assigned a unique barcode to that shipment ID, then you could scan that, and it would load in everything that's within that shipment.
Melanie Melton: Okay, cool.
Alex Mentzer: Or the tracking number. Like, if you get these things, the carrier, and you want to be extra detailed, it gives you the room to add those in.
Melanie Melton: Okay, so this barcodes section has to do with, Like, populating the shipment.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, like a shipment ID, not necessarily assigning individual barcodes to products.
Melanie Melton: Got it. Okay, good. See, I'm still learning something new every day. Okay, so yes, you can add in, you know, once you're notified that it ships, if you want to, add in a tracking number before it arrives, you can do that here. Carrier, expected date, ship cost, all that. So that was receiving an entire order, but we know that things, that doesn't always happen. So, we're gonna go into another scenario here, with an in-progress transfer record, and we're gonna do a partial receiving. So let's say, that these first two snowboards came in, and this last one is backordered. It's still coming, we're still gonna take it in, but it's gonna ship, maybe next month. So, we're gonna keep it on order. So, these two here, we're going to go ahead and accept. So, we're gonna do two. We're not accepting any here, and we're gonna hit save. So now, this transfer record is a partial receipt, so we're gonna see that these two came in. And we're added to inventory. This one is still showing in transit, so this transfer record is still in progress. It has not been closed out yet, because we still have a pending item on this. And then once that comes in, you can come in and receive that. And you would just go here, and you will see that, these two, it shows 2 of 2, so we've already received those, we just need to go up here and receive this one. And now this entire order has been marked as transferred. You've just received them at different times. So, another scenario is, let's say this order's late, and it's just not gonna come. So, there's a couple different ways you can do that. The quickest and easiest way is to just reject all the items. So, one thing about Shopify is that we cannot, like, in order for it to relay that a product's not coming to us, we have to reject it. So basically, it was coming from the vendor, and now we're saying, nope, back to the vendor, it's just not coming, even though that's not totally what's happening, it was never shipped, that is how Shopify is treating this. So, let's say we come here, and we got these first two, and this one did not come. You contacted the vendor, and they said, we were canceling it. So you would hit receive. And we're gonna accept 2 of 2 for these, and then we're gonna change this dropdown to reject. We're gonna reject two. And if only one wasn't coming, you could just reject one and leave another one on order. But in this case, we're gonna reject two of these, so we hit save. And now this transfer record is complete, we've rejected this one, it's not coming. These two have been accepted. So that would be a partial cancellation scenario. Let's see, Michelle. Hi, Michelle! What do I do if I have accepted a few items, and it's saying I have 8, but I only have 2. So, Michelle, can you clarify, is invent, like, inventory is saying you have 8?
Alex Mentzer: I ordered 8, but only 2 arrived.
Melanie Melton: It's saying I have 8 on the order, 8 were supposed to come, or 8, the inventory is showing correctly, incorrectly. She's hopping on. You're muted, Michelle, if you're trying to talk.
Michelle Charnock: Hey. Hi! So, I ordered, I ordered 2, and then I've ex, I was playing around with it, and I have 8. Like, I've accepted it so many times that it's saying I have eight, but I only have 2.
Melanie Melton: Okay, So, in that situation, Alex, would you handle that as changing the inventory at the product level, or a return to the vendor?
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, that, it really depends on your best practices. You know, that would be a good question if you have an accountant, making sure that's going to flow through to your backend correctly, either as an inventory adjustment or line adjustment. You just want to make sure you're managing that, but for me, in that instance, yeah, a return to vendor would be probably the proper process, but obviously, make sure, you know, set a company standard, have a best practice on what you'd like to do there.
Melanie Melton: Yeah, because you could, you could create a transfer, just a transfer on its own, and select from your store back to that vendor, and add that item, and do the 6 that you're essentially sending back. And that way it would come out of your inflow on the plans. If this is just a one-off thing, you could just go into the product and change the inventory from 8 to 2. We're not gonna see that in your receiving, but again, if this is just a one-time instance and it's not a huge dollar amount, I would say it's okay to go into the product and just change the inventory value. How do I cancel or delete an entire order? Is there a way to do it as an entire order, rather, that just... Yes, Julie, that was actually my last scenario here. So, I'm gonna go into this transfer record here. And we are going to reject this order, so the whole order did not come. So you can do one of two things, and the fastest, quickest way is to just go here to receive items and hit this button, Reject All. And essentially, that just closes out this transfer record. So, you could just, two buttons, receive, reject all, none of it's coming, this will be marked as transferred, because it's done, but all units have been rejected. Another thing you could technically do is cancel the entire order, but you cannot cancel an order, like, there's no option to do it if it's already marked as in progress. So it has to be in ready-to-ship status in order to cancel off a transfer. So there is a way to move it back into ready-to-ship status, but it's a little, like, you can edit the shipment and unselect all of them, which basically moves these products off of that in-transit shipment. It's saying, no, wait, these are not in, these are not in transit anymore. So it moves into ready-to-ship status, and in that case, you can cancel the transfer here. But, to be honest, in that situation, we will pick up either scenario. If you cancel, if you move it back to ready to ship and cancel it, we'll still see that it's not on order anymore. It's those single line item cancellations where we have to reject them, not cancel them. Those we're rejecting. But it is way faster to just hit reject all, so I recommend just doing that. Okay, so, that is. Essentially, process start to finish. A couple things about Shopify is you can also go in the timeline here and leave comments between you and your staff, so it could be, you know, you could do that on the PO record or the transfer record, and you could say, like, hold size medium for Alex. You know, you could, like, for a certain customer, or, you know, if someone special ordered something. So you can speak to your staff, in the comments here, just so you all are on the same page. You also can make attachments. So if you have a, an invoice from the vendor, and it's shipped, and they emailed you a copy of the invoice, you can come to the transfer record and attach that here, so that the vendor's copy of the invoice is on it, and you can make sure that everything aligns with what they said they shipped. Because I've been in that situation before, where they say they shipped it complete, and you're still missing a size small. So having that original record on here is helpful, too, and you can make attachments both in purchase orders and in transfers. Okay, so that's pretty much it for process. Alex, do you think I missed anything? Was there anything that would be helpful to know?
Alex Mentzer: No, I mean, I think when you're creating a purchase order, too, like, there are additional filters, because some clients will have thousands and thousands of products. You can add in the vendor to get, narrow down those products. Maybe you entered them 2 weeks ago, they're not right there at the top. You can do additional filters when you're creating a purchase order to narrow down and make it easier to select those. And, you know, that helps, and, you know, we talked about updating costs individually, ahead of time, which is, you know, important. And, you know, it's really just about the upkeep, but it's no different than any other system or Stocky before, like, the maintenance takes some work, but the reward, whether you're working with Management One or not, the reward on having this visibility is, It is a game changer.
Melanie Melton: Totally. Michelle, what did you say I do when they didn't send all the products? So, if they didn't send all the products, you can, basically, you're gonna click Receive Items, and you're just going to tweak what came and what didn't come. So if you have, like, in this case, we have two still in transit, and let's just say they're not coming anymore, we could go in here and find it. So you can see we've received one of three. And we left the second, the next two on order, but let's say they've been canceled. You can come in here and don't hit cancel, hit reject. Hit reject the last two, and hit save. And now this order has been closed out. We rejected the last two units that we thought were gonna come. Let me know if that didn't answer your question. So, we're gonna move now to... perfect. We're gonna move now to the Shopify app within Retail ORBIT. So, one of the big limitations of Shopify at the current moment is the lack of reporting as it relates to your on-order. So Stocky had a really good way to export items that were coming, filter, see, you know, okay, my coach is telling me that I am pretty heavily bought in dresses in October. I just want to go take a look at everything I have coming out in dresses in October, and make sure I still want it all. So, we have built a report in Retail ORBIT now, it's called the On Order Report. Everybody here, if you are a Shopify user and a current client of ours, you by default have the Retail ORBIT app within Shopify. If you're not an existing client in Management One, I highly encourage you to go download. It's free. You get a ton of insights with it, and you also can access this report, which otherwise doesn't exist, so this is a really great way to keep tabs on what you have on order. So you would open the Retail ORBIT app, go to the on-order report, and this is where you can take a look and see what's coming. So, you can set your estimated arrival range, so you can do a custom range if you just want to see, what's coming on October 1st through October 31st. And you can see all in-progress orders here. You also can click into them. And see what SKUs are coming, and you can also open full details in the expanded view and see each SKU. And the cost, and how much you ordered. Whoops. You can see, you can set two different transfer statuses, so you can see if anything is still in progress, or if it's marked transferred. You also could just spot check yourself and see if anything's marked ready to ship, because if it's marked ready to ship, remember, we're not picking it up. It has to be marked in progress. You can also filter by product type, so if you want to see certain product types that are coming within certain deliveries, you can look at that as well. We also have the ability to export a CSV of all of your orders, and I just want to let you guys know that we are actually actively working on some improvements to this CSV. So we're looking to add, like, individual SKU items, so it would be similar to that purchase order items export from Stocky. We are actively working on, getting that feature added, so that, right, like, right now, you export it and you just see the orders. We're gonna have a lot more detailed information on that export in the very near future. So, this is where you would come to really kind of manage your orders and make sure everything's coming on time. Just a nice, clean way to see what's coming in the future, because right now, in transfers and Shopify, there's no way to say, okay, what's coming in October? What's coming in September? So this is a really nice, fast way to do that.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, and I think for, especially, getting into Q4, if you're using the tags, you can tag things, let's say you're tagging holiday, and you can really just say, like, okay, how much have I spent directly just contributing to holiday? That's where that tags can be useful. So there are some really nice features that we can pull and filter this data on.
Melanie Melton: Absolutely, yep. And one feature I really love that's newer on this report is you can come up here, and let's say you set your date range to a month in the future. You know that your store cannot live without having these 5 vendors on order. Like, these are your best performing vendors. We always have to have new products coming in. You can actually filter here, and see which vendors you have on order for that particular time frame. Right now, it's all dates, but you could set this for a certain month in the future and see which vendors you have on order, and make sure that those vendors are on that list. Alright, so we're right at 45 after. I wanted to leave some time here at the end for everybody to ask their questions. Is there something within your PO process that's been holding you up? Is there a pain point we can try and guide you through? Now would be a fabulous time to ask, because someone else might benefit from the answer to that question, too. So. Please let us know if there are any questions.
Nico: I think you guys have done a fantastic job answering them live as they come in on chat. So we did have one in the Q&A panel, it was related to Square, but I already alerted our support team. It was a client of ours, so we've already got them the information that they need.
Melanie Melton: Fabulous.
Nico: And I'm looking through, just checking our chat to make sure. I think you guys covered everything in here as they came in, so fantastic job.
Melanie Melton: Great.
Nico: Yeah, hopefully everyone's up.
Melanie Melton: I was just gonna say, hopefully everyone's had a good amount of time with Shopify POs now and feel a little more confident, but I know it's been a big change. We're currently on Lightspeed R-Series, but are curious about the switch to Shopify. How does the analytics of Shopify compare to that of Lightspeed? So, Kelley, I have some experience in Lightspeed reporting. It's, I would say it's fairly similar. I can't, our support team might be actually able to, guide you a little bit better on that. But also, like, you are welcome to schedule, a time with one of us, too, about, you know, to just kind of go through Shopify reporting, and we can kind of take you through how it works. Again, Alex and I are in Shopify every day building reports for clients, so. What I can tell you is that, for the most part, everyone has what they need from Shopify reporting. So, let's see, Julie's chiming in to help, because she's used both. If you're online, Shopify wins, hands down. You will lose some reporting, but Management One filled that gap. Perfect.
Alex Mentzer: Yeah, I think that in Lightspeed R, that additional analytics that you can go into, it's a little, it's a clunkier system, it's not as intuitive.
Melanie Melton: Yeah.
Alex Mentzer: To learn. I think Shopify, some of that is a little bit more intuitive in trying to build reports, and then you can save them just like you can in Lightspeed and access something very directly, and they are actively working on having, you know, holding data longer periods of time so you can access things and have more of that historical record that maybe Lightspeed had the advantage of in the past.
Melanie Melton: Yeah, and I think that Shopify reporting in general, I think that's a good call-out. It's a little more user-friendly. I know when I've gone into Lightspeed before, it takes me a little bit longer to just kind of get my bearings and figure out which report's gonna give me the info I'm after. In Shopify, you have a lot more freedom to customize the report and add in dimensions where you need them, so that's, that's helpful. And then I think there was a question about the recording, yes.
Nico: Yeah, easy one. Shannon was asking if she wants her employee to watch it. We want your employee to watch this. So, usually it takes, give me about 24 hours, and we put all of our webinars up on the website, so I've dropped a link right there in chat. If you don't want to wait the 24 hours, there's dozens of recordings of previous webinars on there. You can get your employees started today.
Melanie Melton: Yep.
Nico: That was, yeah. So that one was it. So, as Melanie mentioned, Melanie took the time to put together a fantastic tips and tricks guide, covering a lot of the information that we looked at today. I will be including that in an email along with the recording, hopefully later today, tomorrow morning at the latest, and it will have everything that you need. But guys, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. This is a very important topic. I know you've had a lot of questions thrown your way recently, so hopefully this cleared it up a lot for the folks online, and we'll have this up on YouTube in no time for everyone else.
Melanie Melton: Okay, awesome. Thank you guys so much for hanging with us today, and yeah, just let us know if there's ever any Shopify questions we can answer. Please don't hesitate to reach out. We're happy to walk you through it.
Alex Mentzer: Absolutely.
Nico: Love it. Thanks, guys.
Melanie Melton: Alright, thank you, bye-bye.