Manager allows you to find and merge duplicate inventory items into a single inventory item. It will not, however, prevent you from accidentally or purposely creating duplicates in the first place. (You might, for example, want to treat individual units and packaged cases separately.)
Finding duplicates
Click Find & merge at the bottom of the Inventory Items tab listing to see potential duplicate items. This search looks for matches in the Item code field. No other fields are considered.
Note
Manager displays one group of potential matches at a time. After these are merged, another group will appear (if any more exist.)
Example
Brilliant Industries has inventory clerks who mistakenly create two different new inventory items for the same table lamp already in Manager’s system without checking the existing list. To make matters worse, the clerks do not follow consistent practices when defining the new items. So inventory of one item is spread among three, with different purchase and sales prices:
Brilliant’s inventory manager notices the problem and clicks Find & merge. Manager returns a list of matches. In this case, because item codes are inconsistent, only the first two are found:
The inventory manager clicks the Merge button.
Effects of merging duplicates
When the Merge button is clicked, Manager determines which inventory item has been referenced in the most transactions. All other items found in the search are combined with this item:
- Only the definition of the kept item is retained.
- Quantities of merged items are combined with those of the kept item.
- The identity of the kept item is substituted on prior transactions for merged items. However, prices on previous transactions are not changed.
- Merged items are deleted.
Note
Because this capability applies only to item codes, other techniques for locating duplicates can be useful, including searching the Inventory Items tab list by item name or keyword and sorting by item name or description. Once a duplicate is found, it can be edited to include the same item code as the item that will be kept. Then, it can be merged, with all the benefits listed above.
Caution
If the inventory item to be kept is referenced by fewer transactions than one you want to merge, do not use this function. The feature has no item selection option.