How are people tracking serial numbers for customers
There are two parts to that. Selling serialized items and servicing serialized items.
For selling:
Go to Company-Settings-Accounting-Items-Settings and enable Serial Number/Lot Number Tracking
You will want to use the Configure link to set up your tracking.
We only require serial numbers on Bills and Invoices/Sales Receipts as we don’t know the serial number at the time of creating a Sales Order/Quote/Agreement.
Then, when creating/uploading Inventory Items, you Enable Serial Number Tracking per Item. The only tedious part of this is when you upload new items, you need to separate serialized items from normal inventory. Chimney parts have no serial number, but stoves do. This is usually pretty easily accomplished by sorting by price. If you sell perishable goods, like spice rubs and barbecue sauce, you may want to track lot numbers as well. Same functionality, but for a different kind of product. For things like carpet, tile or stone, where the slight color variation between stocking orders can cause problems, lot numbers are used as well, so you are sure to sell matching product to a single customer.
This will make it so when you enter a Bill, Invoice or Sales Receipt a serial number is required and easily tracked. Here is the Striven Item Management Page for more details.
For servicing:
Go to Company-Settings-Customers/Vendors-Assets-Types and create the types of serialized equipment you service. You can be as detailed or broad here as you want. If you just want one type called Equipment or Appliance, that’s all you really need, but if you want to know which customers have gas grills vs pellet grills, you may want to be more specific.
Set up your basics…
Then you will want to add at least one custom field for Serial Number, but you can add several.
Use the waffle menu to get to Custom Fields
Then add your custom fields.
Now you can add Assets as a requirement for your service Task Types and you’ll be able to add and choose the Customer’s Assets from the Task. For more details, here is the Striven Customer Asset Management Page.