How to get Low Stock Notifications

Your inventory is your business. So, proper management of your inventory is instrumental in delivering on your commitments to your customers and allows your business to thrive.

The low stock notifications feature is a part of the inventory management system that Alto’s offers to prevent out-of-stock issues for your ingredients and products. By enabling this feature, you can get notifications about low stock ingredients/products to your email.

To start getting email notifications about ingredients/products that are low or out of stock:

1. First, make sure that the Low stock notifications feature is enabled at your Back Office (normally, it is enabled by default). Go to Back Office > Settings > Features to check and if not enabled, then turn the Low stock notifications toggle on.

2. Next, go to Back Office > Products > Products > All. For ingredients, similarly, go to Back Office > Products > Ingredients > All.

3. Tap on the product on which you would like to get low stock notifications. Under the Inventory section, switch on the Track stock of product toggle if it’s not switched. Here, additionally, you can select the primary supplier of your product from the list of existing suppliers and enter the Default purchase cost per unit, if applicable.

For ingredients, similarly, tap on the ingredient on which you would like to get low stock notifications. Under the Inventory section, switch on the Track stock of ingredient toggle if it’s not switched.

4. Then, under the Business locations section, tap on the relevant business location. In the popup window:
   1. enter/edit the product price for that location (this field is not available for ingredients);
   2. enter/edit the actual product/ingredient stock quantity in the In stock field;
   3. enter/edit the optimal product/ingredient stock quantity in the Optimal stock field. With an optimal stock quantity, the system automatically calculates (optimal stock minus actual stock) and recommends the order quantity when you create a purchase order for this product/ingredient;
   4. enter/edit the quantity at which you want to be notified about low stock in the Low stock field;
   5. Tap Save once you are done.

5. Don’t forget to save your changes before leaving the product/ingredient page.

6. Now you will start getting daily notifications about low stock products/ingredients to your email.
7. To check the current level of your stocks in real-time without waiting for a notification, go to Back Office > Products > Products > All, where under the In stock column you can see stock levels of products with Track stock function. Products with low stock or no stock at all have corresponding notifications in red (“Low stock” or “Out of stock”). For ingredients, the steps are similar (Back Office > Products > Ingredients > All).

8. Making changes, as in the example above, for each product one by one can be time-consuming. To make it easier, you can do it in bulk.
9. Export the product/ingredient list in .CSV or Excel format and open it to edit.

10. Make necessary changes in the Track stock, In stock and Low stock columns for each product. Note, that Y and N under the Track stock column stand for enable track stock and disable track stock, respectively.

11. Once you have finished editing, save and import the updated file back to the system.