Identifying Tracking Needs

Sometimes it is important to be able to associate an exact item or range of items with an exact customer, serial number, date code or shipment date.  This can be important for support and maintenance purposes or recalls. Often larger cost items that have a warranty or support contract are tracked by serial number so that if the item is sent back for maintenance you can be sure you are not fixing a product that is out of warranty.  Some items need to be tracked by lot or date code because the batch they are in is important or they are perishable.

InventoryCloud allows you to specify up to three required tracking fields - Lot, Date Code, and Serial Number. The Quantity field will appear on all the Track-By's screens. It is a default field and is mandatory too.

• Serial Number is the most common and differs from the rest of the tracking fields. Serial Numbers must be unique for each piece of inventory.  When an item is tracked by serial number, a unique serial number must be entered for each individual piece of that item you enter into the inventory. When the item is removed or moved, the system will also require the serial number. This allows the location and movement of the item to be tracked exactly. The other tracking fields are not required to be unique. If you are tracking by lot, you could add 100 items with lot number 206.
• Date Code is used if the item has an expiration date or production date that is important for recalls or tracking. Do not use the Date Code field to track when an item is added to InventoryCloud. Each Add transaction in InventoryCloud is time-stamped to allow you to track when an item was added. To track when an item is added, view the Transaction List (Transactions > Transaction History) or run the Transaction Report.
• A Lot number is an identification number assigned to a specific quantity, batch, or “lot” of an item.

There are three optional tracking fields - Reference Number, Vendor, and Customer. The optional fields will appear in the New Inventory, New Assembly & New Kit screens. These fields can be filled out but are not required unless you make them required when the item is created. To make these optional fields required, click on the checkbox in the Create New Item screen. By doing this, the optional field will become a required field for that item.

You can select tracking fields on the Edit Item screen as long as no inventory has been added to the item. After the inventory is added to an item, the selections you made to the three tracking fields cannot be changed without first removing all inventory from that item.  

Selecting a tracking field means that when you process an add, remove, move, audit, pick or receive for an item, you will be forced to specify a value for the tracking fields you specified.  

The required and optional trackby fields can be renamed to reflect the names you use. Please refer to Form Customization for more details.

Tracking Fields Best Practices Make sure you specify what you want to track before adding inventory. Make sure you print a label for each trackby field you have selected to use and attach them to each item. If the labels are not physically attached to each item, it will be very difficult for you to keep track of which items should be tracked by a specific field.