All Collections
Items
Other
Account Data Cleanup Tips
Account Data Cleanup Tips

Tips to maintain the accuracy of your account data over time

Nick Neale avatar
Written by Nick Neale
Updated over a week ago

Article Contents

Introduction

To make sure your data is accurate, we recommend periodically reviewing your account's items and POS Items.

Over time, you may create duplicate items, make mistakes when mapping POS Items, have unused items and more.

All of these things can lead to issues with your consumption and variance. In other words, you may see numbers that don't make sense.

The tips outlined in this article go over ways to check your data for any issues, and how to fix them.

Items

Find Duplicate Items

Over time, your account might have duplicate items. There are a few reasons this can happen:

  • An item’s barcode may have been typed in manually and was missing a digit, so when scanned, it doesn’t find a match in your venue's items and searches the online database

  • Sometimes items come in cases/packaging, and the barcodes on the case and individual item are different. Often with beer bottles, the barcode on the bottle and the case may be different, or the bottles don’t have barcodes.

  • Adding items to an invoice by using the search function instead of scanning the item’s barcode

To help find duplicate items, you can use the search on the "Items" page, or you can use the "Duplicated Barcodes" predefined filter.

The "Duplicated Barcodes" predefined filter is highlighted for emphasis.

If you suspect that a duplicate item was added recently, you can also toggle on the "Added On" column and sort by the most recent time (see Customizing Your Web Display).

The "Added on" column showing when an item was added to the account.

If you find duplicate items, you can them merge them together into one item. To learn more, see:

Archive Unused Items

If your venue has a large number of items that you no longer carry (and don't plan to carry in the future), you can archive them. Archived items don't appear on your "Items" page.

After taking an inventory count, apply the "Not in Stock" filter. This shows everything that wasn't counted in the most recent inventory. You can then archive anything that you no longer sell.

You can archive everything, multi-select, or choose individual items.

Note: If you attempt to archive an item that is currently used in a POS Item or Batch, you will need to remove it first.

To learn more about archiving items, see:

Check Item Measurements

Sometimes you create / add an item to your venue and discover later that it's the wrong size, or wrong unit of measurement.

Before catching the error, you may have inventoried the item a few times, received it on an invoice, etc.

Common mistakes include:

  • Putting the correct quantity, but wrong unit of measurement. For example, putting 1000L instead of 1000ml, or 12ml instead of 12oz

  • Using "unit" or "each" as the unit of measurement on a weight or volume based item. You won't be able to count partial units or map recipes / batches easily.

If you see an item measurement that looks wrong, you can change it. To learn more, see:

Check Excluded from Variance

The “Exclude from Variance” feature is meant for items you don’t want to use in variance calculations.

These are typically items you inventory but don’t sell, or items that are difficult to track accurately.

If an item is excluded from variance but actually needs to be included, it won’t be visible on the Variance page.

You can see which items are excluded from variance by using the “Excluded from Variance” filter on the Items page.

If an item is accidentally set to be Excluded from Variance, this can have a large impact on your data.

To include an item in variance calculations again:

  1. Click the checkboxes beside any items that have been excluded from variance (use the predefined filter or check the “Excluded from Variance” column)

  2. Click the “Include in Variance” button

To learn more, see:

Restrict Item Editing

To help keep your data in good shape, you can assign users to roles that aren't allowed to add, edit, or archive items.

We provide the Manager (No Item Edit), and Admin (No Item Edit) roles by default, and you can create custom roles of your own. To learn more, see:

Sales / POS Items

Check POS Item Mapping

By checking your POS Item mapping, you can spot any issues with either your item costs or quantities that would impact your variance data.

When reviewing, make sure the correct items and quantities are mapped to your POS Items. If you carry an item in different formats, for example a beer that can come in cans, bottles, or keg, make sure that you've mapped the correct one to its corresponding POS Item.

Additionally, when you create new menu items in your POS, you'll need to map them in WISK. If you have any unmapped POS Items, you'll see a message along the top of the POS Items page:

To learn more, see:

Check Archived POS Items

If a POS Item is archived but shouldn't be, this impacts your sales and variance data.

For this reason, we don’t recommending re-using buttons in your POS. If you have a new menu item, we recommend creating a new button for it. It’s possible you may have archived the POS Item in WISK, but then reused the button for it.

This could happen when you set up your venue and do your initial mapping and months later you add a new item by recycling a button in your POS. That POS Item will still be mapped so it's a good practice to check your archived items.

To see all archived POS Items with sales data:

  1. Under "Predefined Filters" select "Archived"

    An arrow points to "Archived"
  2. Click the view selector and select "Most Sold Last 30 Days"

    The view selector is highlighted and an arrow points to the "Most Sold Last 30 Days" view

  3. This shows all archived items that have sales in the past 30 days. If you see an item archived that shouldn't be, you can restore it

    It now displays archived POS Items with sales in the last 30 days.

You can also find archived POS Items by typing the name of the POS Item in the search bar, if there are any archived matches you'll see a message. Click the message to see the archived POS Items.

The "archived item" message is highlighted for emphasis.

To learn more about archived POS Items and how to restore them, see:

Reused / Recycled POS Items

If you created a new menu item in your POS, but re-used an existing button this can cause issues with historical sales data.

If you have new menu items, it's always best to create a new button in your POS. This is for two reasons:

  1. If you recycle buttons from products you no longer sell, the history is tied to the PLU number/POS Code in your POS. If you recycle a button and change it to a new item, the system will think that you always sold the new item for all past sales

  2. If you archived the POS Item in WISK, then change that button to something else in your POS and start selling a new product, the POS Item is still archived in WISK and you won't see the sales

Note: If you know for sure an item was sold, but you don't see it in your archived POS Items, it's possible you permanently deleted it at some point. If an item has been deleted permanently by mistake, please contact [email protected] and the development team will be able to restore it for you.

Did this answer your question?