Barcode Inventory Management Software

Hello, this is Mike with Finale Inventory. In this short video, I wanna cover the topic of barcodes and barcode inventory management. Here at Finale Inventory, we have a wonderful integrated barcode solution that's custom developed by us. We have both a mobile barcode scanner and a tethered USB scanner. And you might be thinking, "Well, what's the difference between the two?" Well, I'm gonna show you here.

This is a mobile barcode scanner. It has no wires needed in terms of operating. You can walk around in your warehouse or your business, and it also does not require an Internet connection or any type of wireless connection either. So, I can kind of show you, it's running a Windows mobile operating system, so it looks kind of like a really miniature Windows computer. So, this is the mobile barcode scanner. And then we also support, with less functionality, but we do support this, is a tethered USB scanner. So, this one has to be plugged in at all times, and it's super easy to use, but it also doesn't have near the functionality as our mobile barcode scanner.

So, those are two different barcode scanner types. So, let's go into more detail about the mobile barcode scanner. So, in order to use the mobile barcode scanner with our solution, you have to come to this area from the home screen. So, this is the mobile barcode scanning. So, I go to Connect to Docked Mobile Scanner. So, from here, you would click on it. And of course, at this moment is when the browser is gonna search to see that it's connected to this mobile barcode scanner. So, in order to connect this to the computer, you simply use the USB cradle, and you just simply plug it in. And once you plug it in, then Windows will recognize it, and you'll see it pop-up on the screen in your web browser. And as soon as the Windows loads the drivers, now you see it available.

So, now that we're connected to the mobile barcode scanner, you simply, to talk to that device, you just connect to it, and then we will synchronize with the cloud. And this blue button allows you to update all the products, all the lookups, your stock levels, all your orders, your purchase orders, your sales orders, and such like that. So, all we do is press that button, and we synchronize with the cloud, and you're done. So, at that moment, the way the barcode scanner works is you then, once you've updated it, you just disconnect. Okay? And now, there's no longer a connection required. So, you can walk around in your business or your warehouse and scan items using the barcode inventory management app.

So, that's how the mobile barcode scanner basically functions. Now, I wanna go ahead and review a lot of the functions that you can do on this mobile barcode scanner. So, with this mobile barcode scanner, we have an application that we have custom written, and it is for interacting with the cloud. And you access it by going to the Windows Start Menu, and you run the program called Finale Data Collector. So, here is what the application looks like. And you can see that it's laid out very simple and easy to understand, and I'm only gonna cover the basics operations in this video here. But you can do a Pick operation, which is where you pick the items for a sales order that you're gonna ship to your customer.

You can do a Receive, which is for receiving shipments against your purchase orders for inbound shipments. You can do a Transfer, which is for transferring between one sub-location and another sub-location, meaning a virtual storage location in your warehouse, or it could be from one warehouse to the other. You can do a Stock Take, that's where you're doing basically an audit and counting the actual stock on hand.

If you choose to hit the More button, you're gonna see more items. So, you can do a Check Item. Check Item is used to scan any barcode, and if our inventory application or the barcode scanner knows what that barcode is, will tell you what it is and how much of it you have and where is it located in your warehouse. You can also do a Check Sub-location, which is for scanning a sub-location barcode, and the scanner will tell you all of the parts and their stock levels that are at that present location. You can do an Add Stock. You can do a Remove Stock where you're just simply adding the stock to your inventory accounts or removing. This is outside of the purchase order function. So, it's just a raw add or raw subtract from your quantity levels. Go to More. You have a transfer and remove function, which is combining a transfer function with a remove function all in one. This is very useful for consignment type operations or for businesses that aren't really selling products, but they need to track the usage or consumption.

Learn Barcode operation is a fantastic feature of the barcode inventory management app. It actually allows you to learn UPC barcodes or the barcodes that are already on your products from the manufacturers and associate them with the products in your Finale Inventory application. Remove operation, Delete operation — this allows you to review anything that you've done on the handheld scanner and either reopen it, edit it or delete it. That's what these two functions are for. So, we've got another menu here. You can do Clear Scanner Data, that's reserved for basically resetting this scanner back to a kind of like a default setting for when you first set it up. Then you have Settings, and Setting is where we can set multiple different options on using the software.

System Info is just kind of what it says. And Quit actually exits the application. So, we can go right back to the main menu. And that gets us back into the main menu of the application. And you can see that the main menu here, it also tells you what version of the software you're running. But that's a quick overview of some of the basic functionality of the handheld. And you can see that these handhelds have a keypad so you can actually type in quantities and type in part numbers and such like that. So, there's a lot of functionality based here in this mobile barcode app.

Thanks for watching and learning more about Finale's barcode inventory management solution.