Processes: Audit Your Inventory
Auditing with Simple RFID
The article provides direction for using our New Audit Flow. We have two audit flows, the "Legacy" flow, which requires a full audit each time, and our New Audit Flow which supports partial/template/complete audits, as well as a resolution process to ensure that required actions are completed. If the web portal side menu does not include the Audit and Resolve & Sync tabs, you are using the Legacy mode. To update the the new audit flow follow the steps found in this article.
If you have questions such as "How do I determine if my inventory is accurate?, or "How do I fix mismatched counts between my RFID counts and Shopify (or other partner)?", as well as, "What's the best way to get my stuff tagged at the beginning?" this is the article for you!
What is an Audit?
An Audit is the process of checking your inventory to identify accuracy between your RFID scans and your Partner on-hand inventory.
With our New Audit Flow you can spot check a few products (Partial Audit), verify a group of products within a specific brand, category, department, or other predefined group (Template Audit), as well as perform a Full Audit of your entire inventory.
After an Audit is complete, the operator reviews each mismatched product to determine the truth. Depending upon what is accurate, the system generates tasks which must be completed. These actions may include RFID related tasks such as printing, adding or removing tags, or Partner related actions such as increasing or decreasing partner quantities.
Audits are the recommended way to maintain accurate inventory and keep your partner system synchronized with your actual stock levels. For new accounts, audits are an excellent way to print tags for products.
Step 1: Create Audit
Create your audit. This can be done via the web portal or mobile app. You can add products to an audit via integration or manually from a spreadsheet.
Step 2: Scan Items In the Audit
Next, you will scan the items in the audit to identify mismatched products.
Step 3: Review Mismatches
Once you have Completed the Audit, Resolve Mismatched Products.
Step 4: Complete Required RFID Actions & Partner Corrections
Finally, perform tasks to align the two including RFID actions, and/or adjusting the partner count by Syncing mismatches / Uploading corrections.
Choosing what to Audit
We recommend using different audit types based on your inventory management goals:
- Partial Audits are ideal for spot-checking the accuracy of individual products or small groups of items.
- Template Audits are best for performing cycle counts on targeted inventory, such as high-value merchandise, fast-moving products, specific brands, departments, or other predefined groups.
- Full Audits should be performed periodically to re-establish inventory accuracy across your entire catalog, such as during year-end inventory or tax reporting.
Smaller, more focused audits are generally easier to manage and allow discrepancies to be reviewed, resolved, and corrected more efficiently through the Review & Resolve process.
Using Simple RFID as a Standalone application
If you are have another data source you wish to compare against, use the Auditing Data from a Non-Integrated Source article.
If you simply wish to scan and identify items which are present, then rescan and identify what is no longer present, use this article.
Standalone Process: Reset Inventory & Identify Absent Items
This article provides instruction for users who do not have an external inventory source to compare their RFID scans against. It assists a user to identify what items are in inventory, and what items are no longer present.
If you wish to compare scans against custom source, such as a spreadsheet, use this article: Custom Source Audits. If you are comparing data from an integration (Shopify, Apparel Magic), please use this article: Audit against Integration
Navigate to Menu
If you are using Simple RFID as a stand-alone application and you wish to identify what items are in inventory, and what items that were in inventory but are no longer present, follow these steps.
Open the Simple RFID app on your scanner or phone that is paired with a scanner.
On the homepage, click Scan.
Reset Inventory
Select Audit. (in this case Audit refers to "Resetting" the inventory
Click Yes when prompted: "Your Inventory will be cleared!"
Scanning Inventory
After accepting the prompt, you will be returned back to the Scan menu.
Select Start new scan session.
This step is similar to the regular scan.
Items that existed in the inventory before it was cleared will be marked as Found.
Items that are already in the active inventory and are scanned during this session will be marked as Reverified. Verified/Reverified items are not added to your inventory quantity since the serial numbers already exist in the inventory.
Click Upload to inventory
Then click "OK" on the pop-up to confirm the action.
After the scan session is uploaded, go to the SimpleRFID web portal and click Inventory.
All scanned items will be under the Verified tab.
The products that were not scanned during the inventory reset scan will be under the Absent tab.
Generate Report
The report of the current inventory can be downloaded by clicking the second button in the top-right corner.
It's possible to download 2 different reports, one for Verified and another for Absent items, which depends on which Inventory tab is currently open.
Each report is meant to represent specific information, but all of them can be downloaded.
The audit scan session can also be viewed and its report obtained via the Scan Sessions tab in the navigation menu.