When you have hundreds or thousands of items in your inventory list, it's important to stay organized so you can find what you need quickly. This article will explain the main tools for managing your inventory items provided on the inventory list: search & filters, item status, named lists, and bulk actions.

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The inventory list screen provides a general search bar at the top:

The search field is kind of like a search engine, but it only looks at your inventory instead of the entire internet. You can start typing anything in that field. As you type, Fielder will look for items that match. The search field can be thought of as a "fuzzy" search tool. It tries to match on several different pieces of data. The more you type, the fewer matches you should get. However, you might want to search for items using a more targeted approach. That's where the filters come in.

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There are some field-specific filters available to the right of the search field:

Items can be either active or inactive. You can use the Status filter to view only active items, or only inactive items or all items. The default setting is "Active". The idea is that you should only activate the items that you actually use, and deactivate the rest. Only active items may be added to estimates, work orders, or invoices. By limiting the set of items to those you actually use, you have fewer things to choose from when creating your estimates, work orders, or invoices, which makes things a lot easier.

The "Item type" filter lets you limit the set of results based on the type of item. The options are Product, Service, and Bundle. Product and Bundle items are material goods that you sell and track. Service items represent services you provide and charge your customers for.

The "Stock type" field represents the whether the item is generally kept in stock at the manufacturer, or would require a special order. Generally, In Stock items should have the lowest lead times, while Special Order items would have the longest lead times.

The "Quick filters" field provides filters that don't fit neatly into other categories. For example, one Quick filter is the "Only in-stock items". Enabling this filter will display only items where the Qty On Hand is not 0.

Once you have filters applied, they will be "sticky". That is, they will persist for you between visits to the inventory list screen. That way, you won't have turn them all back on when you leave and come back to the screen. If you want to reset to the defaults, you can simply click the "Clear filters" link that appears to the right of the "Quick filters" field once you have at least one filter enabled. Note that the filters are saved on your browser. If you switch to a different browser or device, you'll have to set your filters up again on that new browser or device.

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You can use the "Item lists" feature to create named lists of items:

This can be a very handy way to group related items. The lists are shared across your team. That is, everyone on your team who has access to the inventory list screen will see the same set of lists. You can use lists in combination with the bulk actions, which we'll cover below, to add all items in the list to your next product order (for example). We are also working on a feature that will allow you to pull up an item list to add all (or a subset) of the items in the list to an estimate, work order, or invoice all at once.

At first, you will have a single uneditable list named "All items". To create a new list, simple click the "Create new list" button in the upper right corner of the Item lists pane. A dialog will appear asking you to give the new list a name. Enter a name and click Save. Then you can add as many items as you want to the new list.

Your new list will not have any items in it. To add items to (or remove items from) an existing list, first select the "All items" list. Then you can use the search bar and/or filters to find items you want to add to your new list. You can either the bulk action menu to add multiple items at once, or you can use the row action menu to add a single item. To use the bulk action menu, select one or more items by clicking the checkbox for each item you want to add. Notice that a new menu appears just to the left of the "Actions" button. This is the bulk actions menu:

Next, click the bulk actions menu, and then click the "Add to list" option:

Next, choose the list you want to add the selected items to. In this example, I only have one list to choose from, "Premium products", so I'll click that one. Then I'll select my "Premium products" list to verify that the selected items were added to it:

Now, if I want to add more items to this list, I'll have to select a different list first because the items I'm currently looking at are already in this list, of course. I can add items from any list to any other list. Items will not be added multiple times. That is, if an item is already in a list and you try to add it again, it won't be added a second time.

You can also add individual items to a list by using the row action menu for the desired item:

You can also create a new list on the fly with one or more selected items by clicking the "Create new list" menu option.

You can rename a list by selecting it, and then clicking the list action menu button (the little button to the right with the 3 vertical dots). From here, you can select "Manage list" to rename the list, or you can click "Delete list" to get rid of it. Note that only the list itself will be deleted. The items in the list will not be affected.

As mentioned above, you can select multiple items to perform an operation on all of them at once. We already covered adding multiple items to a list. You can also add the selected items to your next product order (i.e., your "cart"), as long as all the selected items are orderable. Some items are not available to be ordered, such as discontinued items or your own products or services. Note that the items are added to your cart without asking you to specify a quantity for each. Fielder will use each items' reorder quantity, if there is one. If an item has no default reorder quantity specified, it will enter a quantity of 0. So, as always, please make sure to review your product order before submitting it.

Another thing you can do with multiple items is activate or deactivate them, all at once. The bulk actions feature was built to make your job a little bit easier by reducing the number of clicks/interactions necessary to achieve your goals, and ultimately save you time.

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If you have any other questions, or need a hand using the Inventory list screen, reach out to us in the Messenger and our support team will be happy to help! 😎

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