Inventory

Product information to help you succeed!

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

+ Item

Adding a new item to your inventory is a simple task! Start by clicking the button in the top right of the Inventory Search page. Then, fill out the modal with the new item's information.

Once you've entered the new item details, select and the system will take you to the new item's page.

You can also use the Duplicate button on the item page to create new items!

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.

Filter the results or add columns to your search using the drop downs on the right side of the page

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.

A department with more “turns” typically has a quicker turnover of products and therefore those products need to be replaced more often.

# 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.

Edit Icon : This is where you can edit the name, employees, turns prefix, square footage, and stock months. Click the icon to open the modal and click “Update” to save your changes

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.

Attachments

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

Make changes and "clean up" your inventory data using the feature!

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.

You will not be able to update an item's average cost or on-hand quantity on the Import/Export page! Check out the inventory worksheet if you want to use a spreadsheet to record physical inventory counts!

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:

Light Requirement	Evergreen	Mature Height: Min/Max (ft)	Mature Width: Min/Max (ft)
Sun, Shade, Part Sun, Part Shade	Yes, No, Semi	Any single number (0.25, 6, 20, 3.5)	Any single number (0.25, 6, 20, 3.5)

Season of Interest	Bloom	Bloom Color	Bloom Fragrance	Salt Tolerance
Any combo of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter	Yes, No	Any combo of Red, Pink, White, Blue, Violet, Green, Orange and Yellow	Strong, Mild, None	High, Medium, Low

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

From here, you have two options:

Confirm Changes

Do not select the “Actually save the changes” checkbox and select Upload. Then, VMX will show you a preview of the changes represented in your import.

Review these potential changes and check that no mistakes were made.

Submit Changes

Select the “Actually save the changes” checkbox and select Upload.

The page will show a list of the changes made and your items have been updated!

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!

Want to set the PLU for your new items?

To specify the PLU for your new items, simply include a column in your spreadsheet labeled "Match" and assign the value "ADD" to all the items for which you intend to establish the PLU. If you leave the PLU column blank, VMX will assign one.

Example Import

Resulting New Item

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.