Inventories

Overview

Tana has three types of records, Item / Storage / Inventory, to keep your inventories up to date.

• Item: represents your product, book, equipment or anything that you want to keep track of (a.k.a things).
• Storage: represents a location, shelf, closet, box or anything to put your Items.
• Inventory: is a record to identify how many Items are kept in which Storage. Item quantity is managed in Inventory record.

Setup

It’s really simple to manage your inventories with Tana, however we recommend to follow these steps as quickstart.

1. Create Storage.
2. Create Item, link with barcode if present, or print and attach Tana QR Code.
3. Associate Item with Storage to manage quantity.

After the setup is done, your team members could read the barcode / Tana QR Code directly with built-in camera of their mobile device and start sending you how many quantity they consumed or refilled.

Tips

Test out by managing small number of items!

It’s always a challenge to learn something new, and it will be tougher when you want to rollout new methodology to all of your team members. If your team is used to manage inventories with Excel or Google Spreadsheet, it may become a pain for you to tell how to use Tana again and again to each team members.

As a first step, we recommend to use Tana by adding small portions of your inventories to see how it works.

For example, try to add Storage and Item that are used most frequently in your Team. Setting up barcode for every Item is highly recommended. Then, invite your colleagues to your Team and ask them to scan the barcode whenever they consume / refill the Item. Your team members will soon discover how easy it is to manage inventories with Tana, and that’s a timing to add more items to manage entire inventories!