Inventory with Serial tracking

If you’re willing to go a little deeper into multiple forms, it sounds like I’d set up three forms in Tap Forms:

– Product form: master form for all of your products with the product details.
– Instance form: instances of your product which has some sort of unique identifier (UUID() for example). This is linked to from the “Product” so that when a new instance (item? part?) is entered, you go to the product and then create a new linked instance record.
– Sales form: this has your sales transaction details stored in it which is linked back to instances. I’d do this as a many to many (M:M) link because it’s possible an instance of a product is returned and you sell it to someone else at which point this instance (part?) would have two sales records.

Riffing a little more, you could have a fourth form for returns which lists which instances were returned from which sale.

For extra credit, if you hook up Tap Forms on the Mac and then Tap Forms on the phone you can keep them in sync with the P2P sync (same network required) and then if your instances are tagged with barcoded identifiers, you can use the phone to find the instance and do the sale transaction on the phone as well as the desktop. I personally used pre-printed barcodes from Amazon with Tap Forms to find stuff I’ve cataloged already. In your case you would scan in the new instance with the barcode that was put on the device to make it easy to find later.

Happy to help! I was going to do the same thing but then remembered how much I hate printers and figured someone else might have done it for me :D (it is a bit of a rip off but I really hate printers)

I’ve been using those ones for a while now and they’re pretty good at being scanned in by Tap Forms on iOS, useful for cataloging and also searching later.

In theory you could also use Tap Forms to make a barcode sheet as well, it has layout support for Avery as well. For the field you want to barcode, go to the field settings and then you can enable the barcode option and if you create a new print custom layout you get the option to drag in a barcode to print.

Tap Forms Barcodes documentation:
https://www.tapforms.com/help-mac/5/en/topic/barcodes

I still hate printers :D

@Daniel, what didn’t succeed about printing barcodes? Is it that they wouldn’t print or they wouldn’t be recognized after scanning them back in?

Does tapforms have this sort of “process” ability? where I can start a process like “receiving” for entering new inventory and “sale” for entering sales record info and removing inventory?

Maybe.

For your use case with the hard drives, my guess is this is a basic process that might work:

– you order a bunch of drives from an upstream manufacturer (could be it’s own form)
– you receive those drives and they all have individual serials, you can load these into a drive form
– you make a sale to a customer and create an invoice and link various drives to them

First one you could put in Tap Forms or not, it does capture the start but also superfluous. The second one seems like your entry point for Tap Forms, you create new drive records when you receive and catalog them. Then the next step is an invoice table linked to your drive. Now Tap Forms will let you link all of this together with two or three forms no worries, what it won’t inherently enforce are your business rules.

You could set up an invoice form with a link to the drive form so that you can select candidate drives. This will work but runs the risk that Tap Forms will display everything in that form, including ones you’ve already sold. A potential solution is in fact two drive forms, one with “available” drives and another with “sold” drives where you move records from one form to the other. That’s possible to do but would interact awkwardly with the Tap Forms UI because the same data will be split across two forms.

If you’re fine eschewing the UI a little and happy to spend some quality time with Javascript, then you can use form scripts to automate some of the process. You could set up a saved search for “unsold” drives (e.g. ones not linked to a sale/invoice) and then implement a pre-check to make sure that the drive you just scanned isn’t already sold before linking it to a new invoice. Of course if you link it to an invoice that gets returned or similar then you’d have to unlink the drive from the invoice.

Whilst Tap Forms has a barcode scanner feature built in on iOS, a Bluetooth barcode scanner for your desktop will likely help you speed through this as well. It could also help you on the phone but I’d personally suggest automating via the desktop this functionality. If you can find a programmable Bluetooth barcode scanner that will let you append “Command+N” to the end then you could do really quick data input.

Without some work, Tap Forms can do some of what you want in terms of the data model but that wouldn’t enable the full process management. With some script fields and form scripts, you could automate most of the process to work for what you need with the checks you want. I’m not going to say yes because it’s going to require some scripting work to fully realise but it’s definitely not no: a solid maybe.

Starting with modelling the data is probably the first problem and then move on from there. Like any database, you’re only going to get so far before you need to teach it some of your custom logic and processes.

That said I write a lot of scripting for Tap Forms to help automate a lot of data entry and speed up common tasks. Scripting added a massive power boost for Tap Forms capability wise to enable all sorts of interesting functionality.