Proper stock control

[Froogle]

Has anyone come across a proper stock control solution for Actinic ?

I don't mean Actinic's poor inbuilt system or Jan's plugin which makes the best of Actinic's poor inbuilt system.

I was thinking something along the lines of a system where when orders are picked, they're barcode scanned which will deplenish the stock and asign that product to an order number as a double check on what items were picked. When the invoice is printed it would include a barcode at the top which makes up the customer's order number.

Is this or a similar solution possible ?

cheers

[NormanRouxel]

There was a thread some time ago, where I suggested a similar system, including both the order number and the customers email address on the printed Data Entry report.

The idea being that the stock picker would use this report to fill the shipping box and then be able to scan both the order and email address to send off a "Goods Shipped" email using an Actinic independent warehouse PC.

See http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=5694 for what transpired.

[NVL]

If you use Sage they (and perhaps others) have such products to scan barcodes for POS control which could be combined with Sage Link / Other Link to Actinic to update your stock via import update...

We just use the old fashioned paper and pencil in the warehouse method, using the accounts package for stock control to be honest. If it ain't broke _____ and like you say Actinic stock control has nothing to break, it ain't there...

[TraceyHand]

and like you say Actinic stock control has nothing to break, it ain't there...

And don't get me started on it

[Froogle]

If you use Sage they (and perhaps others) have such products to scan barcodes for POS control which could be combined with Sage Link / Other Link to Actinic to update your stock via import update...

We just use the old fashioned paper and pencil in the warehouse method, using the accounts package for stock control to be honest. If it ain't broke _____ and like you say Actinic stock control has nothing to break, it ain't there...

the paper and pencil method would not be suitable for us due to the amount of orders and stock we process.

[I-CC]

Actinic has just purchased Checkout Retail, which is a EPOS combined with a very good stock control system, so although it is unlikely this will appear over the coming weeks, it may be that an addon solution will be available using this new purchase in the not too distant future, maybe 3 - 6 months might be on the cards and not unreasonable as they will no doubt want to capitalise on the new purchase, although that would be for Actinic of course...

[Froogle]

To be honest I am not too keen on buying a further update for Actinic to get it to do something relatively simple which should have been included in their original software.

The EPSO software will have tons of extra features that I don't particularly need. I will have to pay for these additional features even though I won't use them.

I found Actinic's site very miss leading when I first started out. Due to this I ended up buying Catalog 6, which I paid full price to upgrade to V7. I then realised I needed some of the features of Business Edition so had to fork out for V7 of this. When I went to launch another site I then had to buy Developer Edition V7 at full price.

I've also had to buy 2 other third party plugins to help Actinic work properly and Crystal Reports to be able to change a little bit of the invoice.

All in all after this, Actnic is still full of flaws which you've got to make do with a "work around" to try and fix.

[Froogle]

Hi Norman

I've had a read of this thread and it looks quite interesting.

Getting a barcode onto the invoice is pretty straight forward I don't think we'll have any problems doing this.

Would it be possible to set up something within Access where when I take deliveries of stock I would input product barcode, stock code, description and stock quantity.

When I process an order I would scan the invoice barcode into the database along with the barcodes of the products I am picking. This would reduce my stock levels, but also create a new record with the order number as the main field and the items picked as part of the record.

I could then pull up the customer's order number within Access and see what items were picked against their order.

We get the odd customer who says they were missing an item. I could use this database as a check to see what was sent as if it was scanned in, then it should have been sent ?

cheers

There was a thread some time ago, where I suggested a similar system, including both the order number and the customers email address on the printed Data Entry report.

The idea being that the stock picker would use this report to fill the shipping box and then be able to scan both the order and email address to send off a "Goods Shipped" email using an Actinic independent warehouse PC.

See http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=5694 for what transpired.

[NormanRouxel]

Nicholas,

What you are describing seems to be a way of bypassing Actinic's stock control and maintaining stock levels by a separate program that would check stock out as you ship it and check stock in as new goods arrive.

I'm sure this could be done but it would require many man-hours of Access Expert time to do it.

Unless you're able to do this yourself you'd probably find that this single-purpose solution might cost a lot more than a fully integrated off-the shelf Stock / EPOS system.

Several years ago I wrote an EPOS to Actinic interface (Norcat). This lets the shop owner completely control the Actinic product tree entirely from data held in the (Top 2 Toe) EPOS system. The store owner only uses Actinic to upload the (automatically built) site and download orders. All stock is maintained in the EPOS system. This allows a store with a high-street presence to have an Actinic site that's in sync with products they sell over the counter. This wasn't a trivial amount of work - approximately 17,000 lines of Delphi code when I last counted!