mInventory Help – Advanced Features
Units of Measures
Units of Measure are attributes that apply to inventory items that give meaning to quantities. Common attributes are pounds, inches, liters, etc. Based on the needs of your company, you can create UOM in the preferences setup table seen below. Once these are created, you can specify them on your inventory items.
The preferences screen above shows sample UOM. To create a new UOM, click the New Measure button. In the table, enter the name and abbreviation. If you want to have sub measures, click the New Sub Measure button when the Measure is highlighted and enter the name, abbreviation and conversion. The conversion is important. It is used by mInventory to convert between the Measure and all Sub Measures. See the example below for clarity.
Example – Bakery Business
Let’s assume that we are setting up UOM to be used in a bakery business. The bakery uses flour as an ingredient in their products. Flour is purchased in large 10-pound bags and depending on the bakery item, flour may be used in pounds or cups. To get this to work in mInventory, you would setup the following UOM.
| Name | Abbreviation | Conversion | Notes |
| Bags of Flour | bags | 1 | – |
| Pounds of Flour | lbs | 10 | 1 bag = 10 lbs |
| Cups of Flour | cups | 30 | 1 bag = 20 cups |
A bag of flour is the measure. The measure should always be the largest UOM. The sub measures, pounds and cups, are more granular measures and the conversion field will allow mInventory to calculate between bags and pounds and between bags and cups. As you build your UOM, you’ll see in the notes field an example of the conversion between the measures. You can always change the conversion later if you have an issue and the program will updated quantities on the items automatically.
It’s best to keep the abbreviations short, as they will appear on screens and reports. Too many characters will cause this to be truncated in some situations.
UOM Usage
Once you have setup your UOM, they are used in the following ways in mInventory:
Inventory quantity display – you specify a UOM on the Items screen. After you do this, the quantities shown on the inventory items list are specified in this UOM. If you purchased or manufactured the inventory in a UOM that is not the UOM being shown, mInventory does the conversion for you.
Purchasing – When you purchase, manufacture or adjust inventory you need to specify what UOM you are using. This can be the measure or any of its sub measures.
Sales – When you sell products you need to specify what UOM you are using. This can be the measure or any of its sub measures.
Reports – the UOM abbreviation is shown on all reports where quantity is used so that the quantity is defined.
Logo and Signature
The standard report used in mInventory can optionally show your company logo. Additionally, the customer payment outstanding report/letter can show your signature. Both the logo and signature and set on the Company tab of the preferences screen. You first need to have an image of your logo and signature on a file on your computer. When you have these, simply drag them and drop them on the Logo and Signature boxes. They will be saved on used on reports at this point. See sample preferences screen below:
Manage Companies
mInventory allows you to create as many companies as you wish. These can be separate businesses or snapshots of your company information at different points in time. Below outlines how to go about managing multiple companies.
When inventory starts of for the first time, it creates a default company for you. The name of the company database it creates is ‘mInventory’. Most users will be fine with this and will never need additional companies. However, if you need to create other companies, please see the information below.
Create New Company
To create a new company – use the “Create New Company…” menu option on the “File” menu in the main menu bar. You will be shown a dialog that will allow you to create a name for your new company. Enter a name and press save. mInventory will automatically open the new company and the setup company database screen will open. Fill in the attributes of this new company and press save.
Open A Company
If you have multiple companies and you need to switch between them, use the “Open Company…” menu option on the “File” menu in the main menu bar. You will be shown a dialog that lists all companies that you have created. Select the appropriate company and press the “Open” button. The currently opened company will be closed and the new one opened.
Backups
You have the option of having your company database files backed up each time that you exit mInventory. This is setup via the ‘Advanced’ tab on the preferences screen. Check the “Automatically Backup Databases” box and then specify the number of backups that you would like mInventory to retain. If you have plenty of disk space, we suggest setting this to the maximum value.
Manage Backups
The backups that mInventory performs are simply copies of your database file. You can get access to the set of backups via the “Manage Backups…” menu option on the “File” menu in the main menu bar. This will open a finder window showing all backups. You’ll see that the name retains the name of the company database and appends a date-time stamp.
Manage Company Databases
The company databases that mInventory creates and uses are located on your mac. You can directly access the database files using the “Manage Company Databases…” menu option on the “File” menu in the main menu bar. Please take caution that you don’t move or delete these files unless you are attempting a backup restore as outlined below.
Restore Backups
If you find that you need to restore a backup, simply copy the backup file from the backups location to your main company database location. We always suggest that when you do the copy, you create a new name for the resulting file. Don’t override the original company database that you are restoring.
NOTE – please be very careful when copying databases between the backup and production finder locations. If you override a company database with a previous version, the original version will be lost. You should make sure that mInventory is closed when you copy any files between folders.
Custom Invoice Numbering
mInvoice uses a default mechanism to create invoices numbers and the model is “INV” suffixed by an automatically increasing number (INV-0000). By default, this number is the same as assigned to the sales order.
If this doesn’t meet your needs, you can change this on the Preferences screen.
To setup custom invoice numbering, check the box titled “Use Custom Numbering” on the Advanced tab on the preferences screen. Then enter a prefix and starting sequence number. Close the preferences screen and create a new invoice. This new prefix-sequence number will now be used.
Note that if you return to the preferences screen after already setting this up, the prefix and sequence number fields are locked and you will need to click on the lock icon to make changes. This is just a precaution to make sure that these values don’t accidentally get overridden. You should be careful if you need to edit these as there is no protection to ensure that you don’t create overlapping number scenarios.