Track a Pool of available Purchased Items in stock

[eric-s-spiceworks]

This How-To will describe steps to create and track purchasing a bulk quantity of items for later installation. It will keep an “available items” pool, and properly track the purchase details (price, PO, etc.) for both budget and ticket accounting purposes.

Step 1: Create the “Inventory Pool” asset

Manually create a new asset to represent the currently available items in the pool. If desired, you can create a custom “pool” asset type, to group multiple pools of different kinds of items.

Step 2: Create the new purchases

When pooled items are bought, create a new purchase for each of the items, and mark them as purchased for the inventory pool “asset” we created in step #1.

Step 3: Purchase list tracks when items were purchased

Each item (whether assigned or still available) has an entry, so budgeting, P.O.'s, etc. are properly tracked.

Step 4: “Inventory Pool” asset tracks available items

Choose “all” on the Purchases section to see the currently available (not yet allocated) items.

Step 5: When a new ticket requires an item from the pool

A new ticket arrives, which requires one of the pooled items.

Step 6: Grab an available item from the pool

Click an item from the Purchases section on our “Inventory Pool” asset.

Step 7: Update purchase to assign it

Edit the available item to make it purchased for the appropriate device, and specify the ticket. Changing the “purchased for” will remove it from the available list in the “Inventory Pool” asset.

Step 8: Ticket now accurately reflects the cost of the item

Ticket now shows the needed item, and it’s associated cost.

[thoyer (Tedcdwsales ( CDW ))]

Very nice I am going to send this info out

[scub (hsc5775)]

looks great
good work

[neil39417693 (Neil3941)]

I might be missing something obvious here but as I see it this will not work if you are making a purchase for more then a quantity of one. Say I buy 5 monitors for stock, or inventory pool, on a single purchase order then all 5 stay together in SW. I need a process that i can take one monitor at a time as an item becomes defective and needs replacing. SW does not seem to have the capibility and it would be incrediably awkward and a lot of extra work to put in 5 purchases for the 5 monitors under a single po number.

[justin.davison]

Hadn’t seen this yet, very well done how to to remember for people who ask.

[jhuscott]

Thanks!

[leswilliams (foobarbigtime)]

It works but not perfectly. Each toner cartridge has to be created individually even if it is for the same printer.

[antonmuller6380 (Anton7997)]

Calling it an inventory_pool does not seem fitting, seeing as you need to load the inventory 1 by one

[michaelaguirre (MikeSatta)]

Look at Eric’s post on importing purchase lists! Don’t want to add each indivdual battery backup like i did? Put them in a spreadsheet, and import using a script. Much faster method for those of us who have to large quantities added at a time.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1733-import-purchases-into-spiceworks-from-a-csv-file

[jamesdyas8416 (James6896)]

I think I am missing something here (at least for toner). Using this method results in substantial amounts of unnecessary assets that no longer exist in your inventory over time. So a single printer would have xxxx number of these assigned to it over time? You also need to distinguish between those that are used and those that are not. So some custom fields needed (perhaps status). Also a few more steps in the process need to be added - the entire process for managing toner from purchase to assign new and replace old is deceptively more steps than depicted here. We need to get a better solution but appreciate at least this one. Or am I wrong?

[t-rex (Laura2838)]

I think this would work well for tracking toner inventory and pinning product with machine/ticket. However, since the original post Spiceworks has updated and the ticketing portal looks different than the screen shots above. I was able to follow all the steps (with some additional looking around), except to add a purchase to a ticket. Maybe I’m missing something. Thanks and looking forward to learning how to use the system to it’s fullest (and have a central place for inventory tracking, as opposed to LOTS of spreadsheets).

[kestpe]

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you Eric for saving me from having to think too hard!!!

[mughistahir]

Any new addition / update on this and a new guide with new SW version?

[andreadearwechter (AndreaD)]

This is interesting and something I’m looking to do. This thread seems to be abandoned though? I would like to also know if there was any new addition or update.

[stevenlahti (WhiteJediGuy)]

Is there a way to have it automatically create a purchase based on an alert since it can create a ticket or an alert for it (the toner, drum etc)?

Edit:
So, I did find a similar Feature Request but that was back in 2014.
https://community.spiceworks.com/feature_request/show/Purchasing/4728