Inventory

Use the inventory tabs to retrieve and edit crucial item information!

+ Item

Search

Search your store's entire inventory using the Search tab on the inventory page.

Filter by in stock, on order, and consignment items. You can also include archived items with the filter function. Add columns to the search such as average cost, last received date, last sold date, last vendor, last cost, total cost in inventory, created date, stock status, and margin.

Departments

Manage and view your department information all in one place! Each column of the department's table represents a big-picture element or metric of your store.

Name: the name of the department

Prefix: this is an optional field that gives you an option to set a prefix to a department. Prefixes show as the first word for every item in the department. For example, in the Boxwood department, the prefix is “BUXUS”.

Employee: the employee(s) associated with the department is usually the department head(s). These employees will receive related emails and notifications for their departments based on this designation.

You can have up to 3 employees assigned to a department.

Annual Turns: the number of turns is an approximated number of times a department is sold out and replaced in a year.

# Items: Number of items in the department

$ Cost: Current total cost of all the items in the department

$ Retail: Current total retail price of all the items in the department

Margin: Overall margin for the department based on the costs and retail prices

Stock Square Feet: Enter the square footage that each department fills in your store. This measurement is used in some reports.

Stock Months: The number of months the department is active and stocked. For example, some holiday departments may only be stocked for 2 or 3 months.

Sort: This is how you want the rows to sort on the department page.

Online : Check if you want a department to show or not show on the website.

Totals: at the bottom of the table there are totals listed for the entire store

Subdepartments

Add subdepartments to organize your inventory and tailor reporting! When adding a subdepartment, you can add additional customizations including warranty settings, tag type, and even set a different name to be displayed on your website.

Collections

The Collections feature is another way to organize inventory. You can combine items from any department. An example of this function is when creating a Holiday Collection. Users could combine popular items like poinsettias, Christmas trees, themed gifts and pottery, and other items and display this collection on their website and even run an Item Sales Report to sort by collection. Items can belong to multiple collections.

Brands

Enter brands that your store carries on this page! You can add a brand name, code (a short key for the brand- i.e. "PW" for Proven Winners), note, and website and then associate a brand with an item on the item page.

Reservations

A comprehensive list of all items that are reserved in your system!

Care Guides

Add a care guide as an attachment and associate it with items to offer additional information about your products to your customers! Care guides can be emailed with the receipt at the end of the sale or on demand from the register page.

The care guide page simply lists all the care guides in your system and the items that they are attached to. The item descriptions and items numbers in blue are links that take you to that item's page. The filename listed in blue is a link that will open the care guide in a new window in your browser.

See more about adding care guides in the attachments section.

Attributes

Attributes allow you to search your inventory based on yours or your customer's specifications. They can be useful when you and your staff are providing suggestions to customer. You can alter the attribute with the Import/Export function or simply input specifications and view results!

Import/Export

In the import/export area, you'll see a dropdown menu where you can select departments for exporting data into an Excel spreadsheet. There's also an option to upload a file for import, and a checkbox to confirm if you wish to actually commit the changes you've made in your spreadsheet.

The file you export is what you use to make changes to your inventory. The Excel file will include informational fields about the item and a field for each of the attributes.

If your company is using the default VMX item attributes (see table below), be sure to only fill in attribute fields with values that match the options shown in the search section.

Default VMX attribute fields and values guidelines:

Once you have made all of your changes, save the file, click Choose File, and select your file.

From here, you have two options:

What's up with the Time Stamp notification?

Are you seeing the "No 'Time Stamp' column found, so any conflicting item changes made in VMX (since export) may be overridden" notification? VMX is warning you that you are missing the "Time Stamp" column on your inventory import file. The "Time Stamp" column contains the date and time that the export file was pulled from VMX so that changes that are made in the live system between when you download the export and upload the import are maintained!

For example, if Andy exports the perennial item list on Monday morning to clean up Hosta descriptions and Meg updates the retail prices of the Yarrow on Monday afternoon in VMX, when Andy imports his Hosta updates on Tuesday, we don't want to set Meg price changes back to what they were Monday morning! The "Time Stamp" column helps maintain changes like this!

Adding New Items Via Import/Export

Need to add a bunch of new items quickly? Use Import/Export!

1. Start by going to Inventory, then Import/Export.

2. Deselect the departments, and then choose one small department- it doesn't matter which, you'll just be using it as your template!

3. Now that you have an attribute spreadsheet to work with, delete the items, but save the header row.

4. Fill in any relevant fields for the new items you'll be adding.

   1. You must have a Department, Name, and Price set.

   2. Delete columns you are not adding information to.

   3. The department and vendor fields must match an existing department name or vendor name EXACTLY as they are in VMX

5. Save and import the spreadsheet to add your new items!

Attribute Search

Input attribute preferences and generate a list of plants that meet your requirements.

Simply complete one or all of the attributes and then select the “Search” button. Below the attribute fields, a list of plants will populate. You can also toggle the “In Stock?” checkbox to see all inventory items that match your search or only items that you currently have in stock.