Inventory Locations

Availability: Inventory Locations is being switched on store by store. If you don't see it on your Dashboard, it isn't turned on for your store yet — contact TORO Support if you'd like it.

If you assign items to shelves and backstock spots, the Inventory Locations screen shows every cigar in the store on one table — and lets you fix them without hunting each item down. You'll find it on the Dashboard's Inventory tab as Inventory Locations.

Each row is one item, with its Display Location and Backstock Location side by side, sorted by shelf. Every active cigar is listed, including ones you haven't given a location yet — those sit at the bottom of the list showing a dash, so an item can never hide from you just because nobody assigned it a spot. The narrow colored square at the far left is the item's status: green for active, red for inactive.

You get one row per cigar, not one per sku. A single and a box of the same cigar are one spot on your shelf, so they're one line here — the row follows whichever sku you actually ring up.

Type a few letters of the brand or item into the search box and the list narrows as you type — "lond rob" finds your London-something Robusto.

Or just scan it. Scan an item's barcode into the search box and the table drops to that one item, ready to fix. A scan also finds items that are no longer active — handy when you're clearing a shelf of something you've discontinued and need to know where the last of it lives. The search box reads shelf labels too — scan the barcode on a shelf edge and the list narrows to everything living in that spot (see Shelf barcode labels below).

Finding the gaps

Two toolbar buttons do the hunting for you:

• Select Missing Display checks every item on the list that has no display location.
• Select Missing Backstock does the same for backstock.

Because the list now includes items with no location at all, these two buttons find the items that were never assigned anywhere — not just the ones missing one of their two sides.

Tick Only Show Selected and the table shrinks to just those rows, so a restock walk becomes a checklist. The count along the bottom always tells you how many items you're looking at and how many are selected.

Fixing an assignment

Every location cell has its own buttons, and the label tells you what each one does:

• SET appears on an empty side, ADJUST on an occupied one.
  • On the display side, both open a small box: type the spot number and press Enter. That's it — no picking through a wall of five hundred squares. Leading zeros don't matter, so the padded code off a shelf tag works: 001, 01 and 1 all mean spot 1. The box tells you what's about to happen before you commit, and there's an OPEN THE FULL WINDOW button if you'd rather see the whole grid.
  • On the backstock side they open the grid picker and the per-item editor, where you can change a location, clear it, or add another.
• MOVE sits beside each side's ADJUST. Where ADJUST edits one spot, MOVE replaces that whole side in one go: type where the item lives now, and every other spot it held on that side is cleared. The Display MOVE only touches display and the Backstock MOVE only touches backstock — hitting the display one never disturbs your backstock spot. If what you type matches more than one spot they're listed for you to click; if it matches exactly one, Enter does it.
• X sits with ADJUST on an occupied side — one click clears that item's spot(s) on that side, after a quick confirm.

An item can be double-faced — two spots on the same side is perfectly normal, and the buttons will offer to add a second spot rather than assume you meant to move.

One item per spot

A location holds one item, on both display and backstock. So when you type a spot that already has something in it, that something comes out. You're always told first — the box names exactly what's being removed before you confirm, and nothing is cleared until you say so. Anything removed this way can be put back from Location History.

Next to each item's name are three small buttons for the work that isn't about locations:

• # starts a quick inventory count on that item — the same counting screen as the Quick Inventory tools. It asks your reason for the adjustments once, then reuses it for every item you count until you close the window, so counting a whole shelf only asks you once.
• ✏ I opens the item's full Item Details screen.
• ✏ IS opens Item Details too, but jumps straight to the particular sku on that row — the one you actually ring up.

The picker shows your locations laid out as they are in the store — cabinet columns run vertically, the way you'd actually scan a cabinet. Click a spot to assign it. An occupied spot shows what's already in it, with a REMOVE for each item and an ADD THIS ITEM button, and hovering any spot shows its contents.

The picker has a search box at the top of the location list too: type a spot and both the list and the grid narrow as you go. When one spot is left, press Enter and it asks to put the item there. Same leading-zero rule — 057 finds spot 57.

Add Items by Location — filling shelves with a scanner

Fixing one item at a time is fine for a correction. When you're walking the shelves putting stock away, work the other way round: start from the spot and scan what goes in it. The ADD ITEMS BY LOCATION button at the top right of the Inventory Locations screen opens a window built for exactly that.

Set it up once at the top: choose Display or Backstock, choose the location (Cabinet 1, the front wall, wherever you're standing), then type the spot in the Spot box and press Enter. You don't have to type it exactly — type a5 and it finds A - 5; punctuation and capitals don't matter. If what you typed matches more than one spot, they're listed with how many items each one holds so you can click the right one.

Now the window is parked on that spot, and it shows you what's in it. Scan a barcode and the item goes in. No barcode? Type part of a brand or item name, press Enter, and pick from the list of matches with the ADD button.

After every add, the window moves itself to the next spot — A-5 becomes A-6, and when you finish the A row it goes to B-1. So you can work down a cabinet scanning without touching the mouse or the keyboard between items. A counter shows where you are ("Spot 5 of 144"), and when you come back around to the first spot it tells you in red so you know you've been all the way round.

The REPLACE tick box

At the top is "REPLACE what's in the spot when I add an item", and it starts ticked. That's the setting for putting stock away: whatever you scan becomes the only thing in that spot, and anything that was there is cleared out. The window tells you in red exactly how many items it removed each time.

Untick it when you're adding a second item to a spot that already holds something and you want to keep both.

If you put something in the wrong place

Nothing here asks you to confirm — confirmations would ruin the rhythm of scanning. Instead there are three ways back:

• UNDO LAST CHANGE at the bottom reverses the last thing you did — it takes the item back out and puts back anything that was cleared to make room for it.
• The little X beside any item in the spot list removes just that one item.
• Everything is written to Location History, so an older mistake can still be rolled back there.

Doing it all from the keyboard

The window is built so your hands never have to leave the scanner. While the item box is empty:

• Left and right arrows move to the previous or next spot (they work in the Spot box too).
• X removes the first item in the spot.
• Ctrl + X empties the spot completely.

These only work when the box is empty, so typing a name like "Xikar" or scanning a barcode is never mistaken for a command. If your scanner is the type that types [CR] at the end instead of pressing Enter, TORO handles that on its own.

Opening it for just one purchase order

When you're putting an order away, you don't need the whole store. Press View Locations on the purchase order editor and this same screen opens showing only the items on that order — the header tells you which PO you're looking at.

Everything works exactly as it does here: search, set or move a location, print the list, clear locations. It's just the short list, so the items with no shelf yet are the handful you actually have in your hands.

Print Locations

Print Locations turns the list into a walk-the-store sheet. Choose which side you're printing (display or backstock) and how to sort it, and you get a printable page covering every located item — the whole store, even if you had a search typed.

Shelf barcode labels

Every spot in the store can have its own scannable label — the spot's name in big print, like Cab 1 | A - 1, with a barcode underneath. Stick them on the shelf edges and the search box on this screen learns a new trick: scan a shelf label and the list narrows to everything assigned to that spot, display and backstock alike. Scanning the label of an empty spot tells you plainly that nothing is there.

Print them from the Inventory Location Barcodes screen, on the Dashboard's Inventory tab right beside Inventory Locations. It's laid out like the location picker — your locations down the left, the spots as buttons on the right, and a dropdown at the top to swap between the display and backstock views. Click a spot and its one label prints; PRINT ALL runs every label in the current view, telling you how many that is and asking before it starts. Labels come out of the station's small label printer — the same one the backstock labels use.

One thing to know: the label carries the spot's name. If you rename a cabinet, column or row, labels printed under the old name stop scanning — print fresh labels after a rename.

Printing a backstock label for one item

A backstock label is the small sticker that goes on the box: the brand, the item, and the shelf it belongs on. Normally TORO offers to print these when you receive a purchase order, but you don't have to wait for a delivery.

Open the item (Item Details) and press Print Backstock Label at the bottom of the print buttons down the right-hand side. TORO looks up wherever that item's backstock lives, prints the label, and confirms with Printed Backstock Label!

If the item has no backstock location set yet, TORO says so rather than printing a blank — set one on this screen first.

Clear Locations

When a wall gets rebuilt, Clear Locations wipes assignments in bulk — for everything on the list or just the rows you've checked, display side, backstock side, or both. It asks twice, shows you the real counts of what's about to be cleared, and then asks for your own 4-digit PIN, because there's no undo button for this one.

There is, however, history.

Location History

Every location change is written down — who assigned, moved or cleared what, and when. Location History (bottom of the window, admins only) shows the full trail, and a change made by mistake can be rolled back from right there: a single row, everything you have selected, or everything back to a point in time. It asks for a PIN too. History starts the day your store gets this update — there's no trail for changes made before it.

The report version

The same picture is available as the Inventory Locations report in the Advanced Reporting Module's Inventory section, so it can be scheduled and emailed like any other report.