Batches & expiry

Some products — medicines, food, cosmetics — come in batches that expire. POS can track stock by batch, with a manufacture date and an expiry date for each one, so you always sell the oldest stock first and never accidentally sell something that's out of date.

Overview

A batch (sometimes called a lot) is a quantity of the same product that was made together and shares an expiry date. When a product has batch tracking turned on, POS doesn't just count "20 boxes" — it knows you have, say, 12 from one batch that expires in March and 8 from another that expires in August.

You switch batch tracking on per product (it's a toggle on the product's Inventory tab, and it's on automatically for pharmacy products). After that, every delivery you receive asks for the batch number and dates, and the system takes care of the rest.

The Live, Soon and Expired tabs

The Batches & expiry screen sorts your batches into tabs so you can act on the urgent ones first:

Each row also shows the product's shelf location at that store, which turns an expiry check into a walk list: filter to Soon, sort by location, and pull the short-dated stock in one lap of the shop rather than criss-crossing the aisles.

You can export the list to CSV or Excel from this screen for stocktakes or supplier returns — the location comes out in the export too.

Why it's useful

• Nothing goes to waste unnoticed. The Soon tab flags stock before it expires, giving you time to sell, discount or move it.
• The right stock sells first. Checkout always suggests the soonest-to-expire batch, so older stock clears before newer stock.
• You stay compliant. For pharmacies and food shops, selling expired stock can be illegal — POS can block it for you.
• Every batch keeps its own price and cost. If the same product arrives at a different price next month, that's recorded against the new batch.

The right batch is picked for you

You never have to work out which box to sell from. POS follows FEFO — "first expiry, first out" — so the batch with the soonest expiry date goes out first, even if it arrived later than another. For stock with no expiry date, it falls back to the oldest batch you received. Either way: freshest shelves, least waste, nothing for the cashier to remember.

Better still, the choice is made automatically. Scan a batch-tracked product and it drops straight into the cart with the correct batch already attached — no window pops up, no queue builds behind the customer. The batch is shown on the cart line, and a change control sits next to it if you need a different one.

This applies everywhere a sale can happen: the till, a back-office sale, a kiosk order paid at the counter, and sales that were rung up offline and synced later. Whatever the route, batch counts and your overall stock figure always agree.

Selling a batched product at the counter

1. Add the product as usual

   Scan or tap the product on the POS screen. It goes into the cart immediately, with the soonest-to-expire batch already chosen and shown on the line.

2. Change the batch only if you need to

   Click change on that cart line to open the batch picker — for example when the customer asks for a specific lot, or you're deliberately clearing one. Choosing another batch swaps it in place and keeps the quantity you'd already entered.

3. If nothing can be sold, you're told why

   When every batch is empty or expired, the picker opens and explains the problem instead of silently adding the line.

4. Finish the sale

   Take payment as normal. POS reduces the count of the exact batch you sold, so the next sale sees the right remaining quantities.

Prefer the old behaviour, where the cashier confirms every batch by hand? Turn Pick the batch automatically at checkout off under Settings → Cashier (POS) and the picker opens on every scan again.

Blocking the sale of expired stock

In Settings you can turn on an option that stops expired batches being sold. With it on, the checkout batch picker dims and disables any expired batch, so a cashier can't pick it by accident. If a genuine exception is needed, a manager with the special "sell expired" permission can override on a case-by-case basis — and that override is recorded. See Settings to switch this on.

Deleting a batch

Sometimes a batch is no longer needed — one you created by mistake, or one that's fully sold or expired and cleared off the shelf. From the Batches & expiry list you can tidy it away using the Archive action on that batch's row.

Archiving is safe and reversible. The batch is simply hidden from this list and from the checkout batch pickers — its full history stays intact on every sale, purchase and ledger entry that ever used it. Archived batches move to an Archived tab, where you can Restore them at any time; receiving the same batch number again also brings it straight back.

Tips & best practices

Notes & warnings

Related: Products · Settings · Stock overview · Stock adjustments · Shelf locations