Always fun when you are working on a blog post and go back to reference (pingback) the previous post where you walked through adding new warehouse workers, and you realize YOU FORGOT TO WRITE IT.

I have the inventory scanner, barcode scanner, setting up the Advanced Inventory preferences…everything… NO USERS.

So, we are about to fix that.

To set up warehouse users, we go through a few steps. The big thing to remember is that these users are a little tricky to set up if you haven’t done it before (and it sometimes takes a minute to sync to your inventory app, so be patient).

The other part that initially confused me on this process was that your pickers and packers start out as VENDORS. You also set them up in the User area with specific permissions, but if they aren’t set up as a vendor as well (they can also be employees, but you have to stage a vendor user for this to work) then it won’t work.

Please note that this doesn’t mean you need additional licenses for all of your warehouse users. You can set up several users in product, and as long as they aren’t going over the required seat count they should be ok signing in and out, such as if you have one scanner for multiple shift warehouse employees. Each shift employee does not need a license. You just need one for the hardware, or however many users will be accessing the system at the same time.

SET UP THE ROLE PERMISSION FOR YOUR WAREHOUSE USERS

Go to Company -> Users -> Set Up Users and Roles.

The system does not have a canned warehouse user role, so you need to create it yourself (Katie makes personal note to recommend as improvement). The default method is to pick the particular user’s login, and then adjust for picking or packing, but many companies have specific picker/packers that don’t do anything else, so having this as a default (canned) role would be helpful, IMO.

I’m making a generic role for my warehouse user next. We don’t want users to share logins (it would interfere with the performance of the audit trail), so you will then go to User List and create your users.

Here I set up Andy the Warehouse Guy as a user. In reality, his user name would probably be ASmith or something similar. I then assign the role we just created.

ADD THE VENDOR

As we talked about, we then need to add the user as a Vendor. Go to the Vendor Center.

Even if your warehouse user is an employee (as most will be), we have to also set them up as a vendor. The critical piece of this is that you need to also go to Additional Info and select Warehouse User as their vendor type.