After you have established your accurate inventory starting point it is time to pull sales from the marketplace to record stock reservations and decrement stock, allowing your fulfillment team to work accordingly.
There are several steps in this process to ensure your are pulling sales into Finale from your marketplaces correctly:
- Confirm Product Catalog and Lookups
- Import Accurate Starting Inventory Levels
- Identify Pull Sales Source: Marketplace or Shipping Platform
Once you have reviewed the above tasks, then you are ready for the final step: configure pull sales task settings.
Confirm Product Catalog & Lookups
The charts below should look familiar as you have navigated through the onboarding academy. In simplistic terms, the product lookup (marketplace SKU) should be pointed to the correct product in order for the pull sales task to work correctly. Often times the lookup and product ID will match when your Marketplace SKUs and Finale product IDs are the same. The only time this step requires work is when they don’t match.
If the product lookups don’t exist and/or don’t point to the correct product ID, this will create product lookup errors on your pull sales task, resulting in incomplete sales orders with product lines that Finale doesn’t recognize.
The easiest way to remedy this problem is to perform a spreadsheet import to add those product lookup associations, or to use the errors found on the integration task if you ran the task prior to ensuring your lookups were correct.
Please reference the product lookup resource for a more comprehensive overview.
Import Accurate Starting Inventory Levels
You will need to confirm you have accurate inventory levels prior to adjusting sales to pull into Finale with an impact on stock levels. Usually, there is an inventory count entered at end of day after fulfillment is completed, so you can adjust settings and go live with Finale the next morning.
Another important distinction to make is that your need your product catalog configured correctly. If you are missing products or don’t have your kit and bundle products configured prior to this step, it will create errors and clean-up work as sales import into your account.
Please note that you can pull sales into your account without impacting stock levels. This article was constructed from the onboarding lens of going live with your stock flow.
Please see the import initial stock level resource for more details.
Identify Pull Sales Source: Marketplace or Shipping Platform
This step was also outlined in the connect integrations resource. The user can elect to pull sales into Finale either directly from the marketplace or from the shipping platform.
Most users use the shipping platform as their order source, especially if they are using ShipStation. This option allows the user to take advantage of ShipStation’s functionality (tags, batches, splitting shipments, combining shipments, etc) and Finale’s features, providing the best of both worlds without changing your fulfillment process.
This approach also allows the user to configure one pull sales task for ShipStation versus having to configure one for each marketplace individually.
Please review each integration map below for more detail with each option.
Integration Map for Direct Connection with Marketplace & Finale
The image above defines the data flow and workflow the user can expect by making a direct connection with the marketplace and Finale. This workflow is mostly used when you have a third party shipping platform that Finale doesn’t integrate with by default. Finale looks to your marketplace for the order and fulfillment status in this workflow.
Another use-case would be a marketplace that holds a specific segment of orders not found in ShipStation, like Amazon FBA or Walmart WFS. You would need to pull sales for these specific sources from the marketplace since the orders do not exist in ShipStation.
Integration Map for Connection with Marketplace, Shipping Platform, & Finale
The other configuration option available to users is through your shipping management software. If your company uses ShipStation, or another platform, to fulfill orders, you can add Finale Inventory to your shipping management and marketplace(s). Finale Inventory will keep track of your available stock without interfering with the shipping processes you already know and love.
This is also useful if you have a marketplace that doesn’t integrate with Finale by default, but it does integrate with ShipStation. Finale can still pull the sales from ShipStation to record the stock reservations.
This is the most-used workflow by Finale users, because it allows users to take advantage of all the Finale features in addition to ShipStation’s feature.
Task Run Mode
The task run mode defines the frequency of the task. Most people select automatic as they go live to ensure sales orders are flowing into your account automatically. The manual option forces the user to select run task from the integration page to manually run the task. The disabled option doesn’t allow the task to be ran.
Please configure your setting first before switching the task run mode option.
Shipment and Invoice Options
As orders populate into your Finale account, this setting controls how the order flows through Finale, impacting or not impacting stock levels.
Another great point for using ShipStation in your workflow is the order routing capability with ship froms. Each ship from will be listed separately allowing you the ability to control what orders are imported or not imported and how stock is updated for those orders.
Customer For Order
Finale does not create customer profiles as orders populate into your account. Finale can match existing customer profiles to an order, but it will not create a new customer entry. By default, your shipping and customer information will be recorded on the ship-to section of the order. This information isn’t lost. It just isn’t attached to a customer profile.
This setting option allows you to assign a default customer for all orders populating into Finale from this source. For example, some users elect to use the name of the marketplace.
Taxes, Discounts, & Fees
Most users skip this configuration option, leaving the default options as these are usually mapped as most users would want. The only reason you would want to adjust these is if you had created your own for mapping purposes.
Wildcard SKU Options
This is usually skipped in the onboarding process for most users. The Wildcard SKU option allows the user to use a lookup to perform an action (import line item as specified discount & fee preset, import using specified product lookup, or do not import).
The primary use-case for this feature is to pickup line items like discounts or specials that aren’t actual product lines and then map those to the appropriate below-the-line-item. Most of these are caught by Finale by default, though. It is also useful if you have digital, non-inventory SKUs that you don’t want listed as product lines.
Expand Bill of Materials
This should be a familiar setting if you had kit/bundle products to configure earlier in the onboarding process. This integration-level setting is the global control setting, impacting all products unless specified otherwise on the product detail page of a particular product.
Finale recommends that you configure this setting as your most-used option. You can then configure the other products that don’t align with this global perspective at the product level.
Order Filter Date
If specified, the order filter date limits the orders that will be imported from your marketplace to only those orders created after the specified date. Most pull sale integration tasks behave in a similar manner with subtle changes. The example below is from ShipStation, offering Finale’s most robust options.
For questions, feedback, or article ideas, email service@finaleinventory.com.
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