Dear all,

Please Help..

I am not an expert with Filemaker and I want to build an inventory for my small company to keep all stock items. Please give me some light on how to do it, if possible, do you mind share a sample one to help me on quick understanding.. ??

Thank you -

Hi Albert, welcome.

That's too generic a question.   Building a solid inventory system is an involved process with many moving parts.  So you'll have to start and let us know where you get stuck.

First order of business is to define the proper table structure, map out an ERD and go from there.

You'll need tables for:

- Products

- Warehouses (if you have multiple - even if you just have the one, you may want to build it with multiple in mind, even if you only have one warehouse you may have multiple "stock locations"?)

- Inventory

- Inventory transactions (in and out)

Not sure if you need to tie this to Orders and Shipping tables that may exist already?

Thank your for the reply. I already have the product table, What I really want to achieve is .. 

I have a small shop that sell car spare parts like head lamp, gasket..etc covering brands like Toyota for example. Each spare part got a unique part number already.. For the same parts I may be getting from a few suppliers and each one with slightly different price.. e.g. supplier A in USD1.0, supplier B in USD1.2 .. Say for example, my current inventory with 16 pcs. on hand  which 5 pcs from supplier A and 11 pcs from supplier B.. Now I made a sales  of 10 pcs,

Now I want to know how can I get Filemaker to help me to keep track these information.. so that I know my actual cost is.. 5pcs with cost USD1.0 and 5pcs with cost in USD1.2. If now I sell the 10 pcs. in USD1.5, how much  profit I am going to make out of this transaction.

Please excuse me cause English is not my mother language and I am trying to speak it as clearly as I can.. Please help.

That's more of a business logic question than how to do it in FM.  In FM everytime you buy something and take it in inventory you add an incoming inventory transaction, that stores the price or links it back to the order if you have those in a separate table.

Under FIFO rules you always sell the oldest units first so your "sell" cost is determined by the oldest transaction(s) for what you have in stock.  Make sure to read up on FIFO and it works in theory. 

Inventory management is fairly standard, are you sure you want to build it in FM?  You may get somewhere faster by just buying an off-the-shelf piece of software...

If you do want to build it in FM, then make sure you understand this concept first: http://www.modularfilemaker.org/module/transactions/

It is going to be at the heart of everything you do.

Hi Wim, any suggestion of an off-the-shelf filemaker software that is good for that FIFO purpose?

I m interested in getting one for my online business.

http://www.newmillennium.com/genesistransactions/

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vKzIGXWv7s