Halo Implemention Series — Stock Control – Video 16

hi everyone and welcome to another installment of the Halo implementation series uh with me today uh you know what I'm going to say if you're um you know a follower of the Channel with me today I have my favorite person at Halo I have Mr Halo himself and I know that he's his head's getting bigger and bigger every time so um hey Morgan how are you doing and uh yeah how's how's things with you hello again how you doing Chris good thanks just uh just giving you a bit of a scratch um I know I know you love it mate so um today we're going to talk about the stock control system in Halo We're going to talk about all things stock um you know what is a stock location how to um you know stock non-serialized products serialized products all that kind of good stuff um we depending on how we go with time we may do this over a couple of videos um but we'll you know we'll let you know um as we're working through this you know when when we do the second video um and then you you can uh watch it from there so yeah just thought it would be good to kind of go through everything you know about stock and uh and talk to us about how Halo handles that yeah absolutely it's um it's probably one of the uh less well understood areas of the platform so hopefully uh the community will get a lot of benefit from the the upcoming sessions that we do around this just like I did with the uh the billing uh particularly the recuring invoices the process that I'm going to follow today is we're going to start off with the most basic example looking at non- serialized products and work our way up in complexity H so first things first we're talking about stock obviously where do we keep stock in Halo where what is a stock location so the stock location in Halo is simply a site that is marked as a stock location uh which is just this option on the right hand side here so uh the sites in Halo that are marked as stock locations are the the places where stock is going to be able to be held now the this option and all of the other options Associated to uh stock control inside of Halo uh are all enabled via the configuration panel where in here we have our items and stock control module and then right at the top here we've got our track stock levels yeah so I was just going to add to that so yeah you know as an MSP your stock location is probably going to be in your own company right so you would just have a location within your own company to be um a stock location yeah yeah cool um so I mean that's where stock is held the other aspect is uh what is what is being held uh and to find out what is being held we go to our products section where provided we have our stock control enabled uh we'll be able to find against our products a few options so got a couple of options at the top here firstly the option to receive stock we'll be able to transfer stock from one stock location to another uh adjust stock quantities via a stock take and we've also got a couple of tabs down here as well namely our stock and our stock history so let me start off by receiving some uh ethernet cables which I'll do by clicking receive stock where I put my quantity uh the cost for receiving those any notes that I wanted to add in as well and the stock location that I am bringing the ethernet cables into where in here we have the collection of sites that are marked as stock locations we'll also see when we're receiving stock and more generally when we're manipulating stock throughout Halo uh that we have the uh the current quantity in stock against the respective locations so let me receive some in there and and now if I go over to my stock tab where where we're showing a sort of high level overview of the the stock currently in Halo uh we'll see that we currently got five in stock and those five are against the warehouse site um as I just received them there uh so next option at the top is stock transfer where of course we are taking uh the stock from one location to another so let's take uh two cables from the warehouse and then put them into our stop room just like so and now you can see that's updated our stock tab uh to denote the transfer of stock there from the warehouse to stock room and then also uh we have our stock history tab which is a complete audit of all of the stock manipulations for this product over time so here we can see the five that I just added in uh the two that I removed from the uh from the warehouse H oh sorry the two that I removed from the stock room and uh put into the warehouse in there and then finally we have our stock take option at the top uh where I can simply adjust the stock quantity for the products within a given stock location just like so and then we can also see our stock history tab has updated to denote that we've just taken those three out of the warehouse yeah and really straightforward that's pretty much all there is to the the most basic sense of stock management inside of Halo uh the next level in complexity that I want to discuss is uh managing stock for serialized products so um this is where the relationship between products and assets come into play in Halo so um notice how against our ethernet cable here we have this linked asset type for serialized assets and the option selected here is not serialized so this is how we denote a product in Halo PSA as being a non-serialized product It Is by specifying this option as not serialized and sorry I was gonna say while you doing that just for you know um you know our viewers who who might not quite understand that just to just to kind of explain that a little bit further um you know this is if you've got items that you keeping in stock that you require a serial number four so that you know how many serial numbers you you have of that particular item in stock but also means when you then take that item out of stock you can also choose which serial number you're taking out rather than just you know box number one of that particular rout or switch I'm taking out you know rout 1 2 3 4 five and that specific serial number is coming out of stock yes yeah exactly um doesn't really matter which HDMI cable you give a customer but it probably matters Which laptop you give them so yeah that's where the distinction comes in yeah thanks for that okay so if we if we go to our serialized product group now and we look at laptop for example we see that the linked asset type here in this case is laptop so the options that we have in this dropdown are all of our asset types where uh as long as we're not picking not serialized as long as we're actually picking an asset type we're effectively saying that this product is a serialized product and uh the analogy that I like to draw here is um imagine you have a phone shop you sell you just sell iPhone 12s you got 100 iPhone 12s in the back office and someone comes in and they want an iPhone 12 um you'll go into the back office and uh the instance of before they come in you've just got 100 iPhone 12s it doesn't necessarily matter which one is which but when someone comes into the shop and they say I want an iPhone 12 you go into the back office and you pick an iPhone 12 off the shelf you scan the the IBI or you scan the serial number of that iPhone and you sell that iPhone to that customer um which means obviously at some point in the future if they come back and say that the iPhone's broken or needs repairing or whatever um you can en sure that the iPhone that they're bringing in that they're saying these repairing is actually the one that you sold them um and to sort of wrap that into just one liner I like to call assets instances of products in Halo PSA so the product is something that you would put on a quote uh in a sales order that doesn't have a serial number at that point but then once you have actually delivered that product to the customer uh you're then going to want to track that instance of that product and doing so would be done so via an asset in Halo so let's have a look at how that actually works in practice so we'll um we'll use the laptop example here we've got our linked asset type as laptop save this um and I'm going to very briefly check an area of configuration so into config and into items of St control um and what I was going to check is this option directly below tracking stock levels and and this is saying at what point do we actually want to create an asset in Halo and there's two options in here when stock is added and when items are consigned or when items are consigned uh when stock is added means that as soon as you receive stock for a serialized product it will create uh the quantity of of assets based on the quantity you're receiving of the given type yeah if you instead pick when items are consigned the asset will not be created in Halo you won't have the option to create the asset in Halo until the product has been consigned slash delivered to the customer so uh this depends on whether or not you want to track those assets in your Warehouse or you only want to create the assets once they have been delivered to the customer location um for now I'm going to do stock is added because what that is going to allow me to do is go into the laptop product receive stock we'll just receive one this time uh into the warehouse where at this point I have this uh window pop open for me where I can input uh my asset tag and my serial number and and we have a message to the right of those details specifying whether or not uh a new asset will be created or if you're entering details uh of an existing asset in the system at which point it would say you can't do that um this asset already exists save that um again notice that we have all of the the same options at the top here receive stock transfer stock take uh do a stock perform a stock takee um we've also got our stock tab again uh denoting that we've got our currently one in stock against the warehouse we've got our stock history and uh in addition to everything that we saw with our non-serialized products what we see for our serialized products is this additional assets tab where uh we can now see all of the assets that have been created from stock editions of our laptop product yep cool that makes sense and and I guess and and here as well I think there's a there's a big distinction between assets and and stock and I think a lot of people get confused with this and and and generally you know stock is something that you keep in stock in your Warehouse whatever ready to sell to your customer and once you've sold it or in this case consigned it to your customer um well depending on what option you pick in there but if you then sold it and consigned it to your custom customer it's at that point that it then becomes an asset on the customer's side because it then becomes an asset that that customer now owns because you've sold it to them so this is just allowing us to kind of say well you know when I sell this to the customer then it becomes it becomes their asset and it sits in their asset register rather than still staying in in stock on my side yeah yeah that's absolutely correct and that's a a sort nice contextual uh response to what we have here because strictly speaking from a technical standpoint in Halo um this is an asset already right so if I click into this there is an asset record in Halo for the laptop that I've just created but as Chris mentions in practice this would really be uh equated to stock and uh while it is still an asset in Halo you wouldn't think of it as an asset in the more conventional sense until this has been shipped to the customer location um this is the mechanisms that we have put in place here for uh serialized products it's primarily a way for us to say right well you're bringing you're bringing a bunch of laptops into the warehouse you need to scan the barcodes uh and the serial numbers we need to store them somewhere so that when uh someone goes to deliver a laptop to the customer they can actually pick from the list of serial numbers and pick one out and there that full audit Trail um and we've done that by incorporating assets into that process and then the actual manipulation of the stock quantities is based on where the assets are in Halo so um for example we've got our one in stock here because uh Morgan's laptop is currently at um the warehouse but if I move that to you know Mario and Luigi's our stock has now been depleted to zero um and our stock history denotes that the ass the laptop has been moved to Mario Luigi's pza place um so with that in mind it's worth noting that the quantity in stock of a serialized product equates to the number of assets held at stock locations in Halo where the assets have been created from stock manipulation in Halo adding uh adding stock receiving stock namely yeah and exactly and I think that that comes down to exactly you know what I said so it it's an it's an asset for all intents and purposes but it doesn't become an asset at the customer site until you you well until you move it to that customer now now that laptop Morgan's laptop now belongs to Mario and Luigi's because at this point I've probably sold it to them and you're right and then it shows it's out of stock because because I only had that one in stock and I now no longer have it in my warehouse um it's now you know sat on Mario's desk or Luigi's desk Mario he bought it he he likes it so we put it on Mario's desk and he is now saying here it is it's on my desk it's now belongs to Mario belongs to that Pizza Company it no longer is anything that I have um I have in stock so um and I like it I like the way that this is done it's it it kind of you know it makes it really clear and I'm hoping to our viewers it's making it really clear is to kind of you know an asset is and I think a lot of people get confused by this they think an asset and stock are the same thing and they're not you know an asset an asset is is only an asset when when it's been taken out of stock effectively and it's been put somewhere else it's been installed or it's been something else then it's then it's an asset yeah yeah absolutely correct yeah um yeah cool yeah okay so um just taking a step back quickly we saw that when we were adding uh receiving the stock for the laptop we had this window popup where we could enter an asset tag and a serial number the options that we have in here are configurable and they are set firstly within configuration items and stock control so if we jump back over there and so firstly we have this asset serialization field so change that to purchase cost go back here close that might have to refresh so now that's Purchase cost and that is a field that is uh added to all asset types or all yeah all asset types when receiving stock for those serialized products so this is your sort of additional field I like to keep that as serial number um because uh and might be jumping the gun a little bit here but if you start to think about how this all ties together um you're obviously going to have the workflow in reality probably look something like you purchase a laptop from Dell um it gets delivered into your Warehouse you receive stock of it so it's now uh an asset in Halo at a stock location um you'll then install your rmm agent on that laptop uh the rmm integration with Halo will recognize that a new device to be imported uh but of course you don't you've already got an asset in Halo that equates to that new device that's been picked up in your rmm so it's important to make sure that you've got your asset serialization field here that maps to one of the fields that you would have configured in your rmm integration um for example if I'm using enable inssite I need to make sure that the serial number is being mapped over from enable so assets created in Halo from a stock Edition uh subsequent to that the rmm agents installed on the laptop the integration between the rmm and Halo recognizes that there's a new laptop to be or new asset to be imported uh upon the import we recognize that there is um a a matching field in our rmm integration serial number um such that when the assets being imported from your rmm into Halo there's already an asset in Halo the same serial number meaning that you don't have duplicate assets uh so just something to to bear in mind there and that is the importance of making sure that you have that asset serialization field here you can also uh adjust the this the other field which we saw to be asset tag at asset type level um which means that each different asset type so each different type of serialized product can have their own unique serialization field and then on top of that there is that Global field that we just saw in configuration items and stock control um hopefully that's making sense a little bit of a mouthful yep following okay good perfect sense yeah brilliant okay so and we've seen uh what a stock location is um and how how to Mark sites in Halo stock locations we've had a look at manipulating stock for non- serialized products we've had a look at manipulating stock for serialized products and how to Mark a product being a serialized product we know what the stock quantity of a serialized product means namely the number of assets held at stock locations created from uh stock additions and we've seen how we can manipulate the serialization fields that appear when receiving stock so uh everything that we've done there is is all very much applicable however this is not how you're going to be manipulating stock uh in practice what you're going to be do what you're going to be doing in reality is you're going to be creating proposals and sales orders and purchase orders you're going to be uh adding products to tickets and delivering them and billing for them from tickets so uh I think we'll to keep this short and sweet we will uh wrap this session up here and then in the next session we'll have a look at everything that we've just discussed now in a bit more of a a practical example and some practical workflows um how does that sound Chris absolutely know I think that's that's a really good place to to stop I think it's to given a really good um you know very sort of basic broad outline of of what asset or what um stock is what an asset is that kind of stuff yeah and I think um so in the next video we'll then talk about as you say kind of how to bring all of this together how to put this onto a purchase order how to bring the stuff into stock um and then you know and then the big one I get asked all the time is how do we then um now we've got these items in stock so we've got this laptop or router or switch or whatever it is that's in stock with a serial number that we now want to sell to a customer um via a ticket or we just want to sell it to a customer via an invoice or something like that how do we get that added to to the invoice to the ticket that kind of stuff so we'll cover that off in in the next video as well and and we'll then kind of um you know wrap up our um our stuff control area so yeah um as always Morgan thank you so much really appreciate it um that was a really great session and uh as always I appreciate you I appreciate you know Halo letting me use you for these videos and always appreciate your time so thank you very much it's always a pleasure yeah always happy to help the community thanks Chris thanks everyone for watching yeah and we look forward to seeing you on the next one thanks