Woosage50 Professional - Stock Updates

Woosage50 Professional - Stock Updates

The Professional version of Woosage50 has the option to update website stock quantities using Sage as a stock master by enabling stock updates in the product settings.

Stock Update Process

Sage products that are to be updated on the website are marked with a Publish to Web (PTW) checkbox on the Web tab of the Sage Product record (see next section). Woosage50 takes all these products and matches them to website products by Product/SKU Code.  

Where a match is found, if the product has Manage Stock enabled, then Woosage50 will update the Stock Quantity for the products.  If Manage Stock is not enabled, then Woosage50 will update a custom field and it will use this for the Stock Quantity if Manage Stock is subsequently enabled. In this situation Woosage50 will issue a warning to indicate that Manage Stock is not enabled (assuming website product creation is not enabled).

If no matching SKU is found on the website and website product creation is enabled Woosage50 will create a Simple product on the website including name, SKU, Price, Stock Quantity and any other product data specified in the settings, as a Draft product.  

Stock updates are carried out at the end of the orders processing cycle, which will run according to the orders schedule or on demand using Run Now. When processing orders, the stock is allocated to the orders and at the end of the cycle Sage Free Stock is used to update the website product Stock Quantity.

To ensure accuracy of website stock we recommend the following.
  1. Import website orders as Sales Orders in orders settings  (to allow allocations or stock to orders)
  2. Auto-allocate stock to orders in orders settings
  3. The pause period for the orders schedule should be set to allow the orders cycle to be run frequently enough to deal with the anticipated level stock turnover.

Defining Web Products on Sage

To allow only a selection of your Sage product’s stock levels to be pushed to WooCommerce Woosage uses a Sage field to identify the relevant products.  In the Sage Product Record, Web tab the Publish to Web checkbox must be ticked as shown below.



Bulk Update of Publish To Web checkbox

To ensure that products in Sage will have their stock levels updated on the website during each Woosage cycle the PTW flag must be set.

The easiest way is to export the SKU of all products on the website using Products>Export, removing any rows with blank SKUs, which are likely to be Variable products (parent).

Then replace the SKU column name with Stock Code and add a column to the right named Web Publish? and fill with the number 1 as show below.

Stock Code

Web Publish?

ITEM-1

1

ITEM-2

1

ITEM-3

1

ITEM-4

1

ITEM-5

1

Then save the file in Excel format (.xls) and the file can then be imported to Sage. Files can also be imported as CSV or XLSX.

Login to Sage as Manager and ensure no other users are logged on to Sage.

Select Import… from the File menu in Sage.

Select Backup… and backup Sage before continuing with the update.

Click Next

Select Product record from the list of Data Types.

Click Next

Select the Excel Worksheet option and ensure First row contains headings is ticked.

Click Next

Browse to select the file saved above

Click Next

Scroll to ensure both columns are mapped correctly.

Click Next

Check the summary and click Import

WooCommerce Stock Management

In WooCommerce you must Enable Stock Management in WooCommerce>Settings>Products>Inventory.  The other Inventory settings can be set as required.

Each product must also be set to allow stock management at product level by ticking the Manage Stock? checkbox as shown below.  If you are going to run the Woosage stock update imminently then there is no need to insert any stock quantity as it will be overwritten by the Sage values, otherwise, enter an initial quantity.  For variable products, the parent should not be set to Enable Stock Management and this should be done in each variation (the parent settings are not critical, as the variation settings will take precedence).  

If you have Sage set to allow negative stock quantities, then you can use the Allow Back-orders? options



If you allow back-orders in the WooCommerce Product Data>Inventory settings the website will not display the stock if it is negative (regardless of stock display settings) and will allow the customer to order any amount.

Bulk Update of WooCommerce Product Stock Settings

For websites with large numbers of products, the options described above can be set in bulk using the WooCommerce Export and Import features as follows.

Export the SKU, Type, In Stock?, Stock, Backorders allowed? of all products on the website using Products>Export, (it may useful to add the Name field to help with identification)
Remove rows where the Type is Variable and any other rows with blank SKUs.
Modify the In Stock?, Stock, Backorders allowed? columns to show the desired state for each product, similar to the following


SKU



In stock?



Stock



Backorders allowed?



Explanation (not to be included in file)



ITEM-1



1



3665



1



Item in stock with backorders allowed and stock managed



ITEM-2



1


 




0



Item in stock with backorders not allowed and stock not managed



ITEM-3



0



0



0



Item out of stock with backorders not allowed and stock managed



ITEM-4



1



236



0



Item in stock with backorders not allowed and stock managed



ITEM-5



1



236



notify



Item in stock with Backorders allowed, but notify customer and stock managed



Note: ITEM-2 is shown for completeness and should not be be used as it will prevent stock from being updated by Woosage
In most cases the most simple solution is to set In Stock to 0 and Stock to 0 for all items then run Woosage to update the records with the actual stock quantities, but this may not be possible with a live website.
Once the file has been modified and saved it can be imported to the website using Products>Import

Extracting Sage Product Codes with Web Publish Status

The attached Sage report (see page footer) can be used to extract a list of Sage products with their Product Code and Description.  The report should be downloaded to your Sage report folder which is usually found under the Company.xxx folder (e.g. C:\ProgramData\Sage\Accounts\2020\COMPANY.001\REPORTS). It can then be found in the list of reports accessed from Sage Products and Services>Reports


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