How to add scanners to receiving process in Acumatica

By “scanners”, do you mean just the input device plugged into a USB port, or a full mobile terminal with OS, screen, built-in scanner, and battery, connected by wireless network?

The latter, mobile terminals, can be used with Acumatica’s warehouse management module.  If you run a browser on it, you can actually open any screen, but the sizing might cause a lot of scrolling.

A USB cabled or blue-tooth scanner is just an input device.  The text from any barcode scan gets sent to the workstation’s keyboard buffer.  Any application won’t be able to tell the difference between scanned and typed data.  The data just lands wherever your cursor is positioned.

So yes, scanners can be added to the receiving process.  How you do it will depend on your constraints.

1. Will a fixed workstation suffice?  You might get by with the browser interface and barcode scanner.
2. Does the receiver need to cover a large physical area and walk around while scanning?  You might benefit from a mobile terminal and the warehouse management module.

@DPaniagua If looking at the WMS route mentioned above, below is a article about devices and barcode compatibility 

@dales50 it does not allow me to view the article.

We use scanners without any WMS bar code reading in some freight in and all frieght out  Works great.  

Thank you all!

I build a customization that allows you to print barcode labels straight from the inventory lookup screen in the WMS app. I’m happy to share that if you want. It uses PrintNode (as opposed to DeviceHub), because it is a lot faster to print labels directlly with that setup. PrintNode costs a little money, but it’s relatively inexpensive. You would need to setup a networked Zebra label printer to use it.

As @dougmcbride79 said, you don’t have to use barcode scanning devices to use the WMS app. It has a built in camera scanning function, which uses a smartphone camera to scan barcodes. I personally like the efficiency of an integrated barcode scanner/handheld computer, but especially for low volume work it’s definitely not needed.

@rosenjon I downloaded the app, I tried my company login used at work (Desktop) did not work. Is the WMS feature a different product?

Here are a couple screenshots from the app. If you aren’t the admin of the site, you may need your admin to add mobile app login to your list of permissions, as well as WMS permissions. I have done this before, but it has been a while. I usually just login with the admin login, which gives you access to everything generally.

Edit: @DPaniagua Also, keep in mind, the WMS is an integration to the site. So if you aren’t running it currently, then I woudl advise againts just adding it to a production instance. It can potentially have side effects on how your system operates.

If you want to play with it and it hasn’t already been setup, make sure it is in a beta or development system that is not your production system. Then you can enable it, configure it, and play around.

@rosenjon Yes I want to play with it at first to get a good understanding before giving it a try at receiving. So, to be able to login I’ll need to request access from the system admin.

@rosenjon I will be applying this high volume work as well, hopefully in this test runs it does nto lag as much, could you explain this “customization that allows you to print barcode labels straight from the inventory lookup screen in the WMS app.” little more.

Currently, label printing is mostly driven automatically from certain parts of the order flow process (i.e. I think you can have labels automatically print when Shipment is created, for example). However, there isn’t really a way to print labels to a Zebra type printer from the mobile app on-demand..the concept in the software currently is you will print them to a laser printer using DeviceHub. There are some integrations that allow label printing, but nothing out of the box, and I’m not sure if the integrations work with the Acumatica mobile app currently.

So I built a customization that adds a “Print Label” button to the mobile app on the inventory lookup screen in the WMS, so that you can print a barcode for that item that is scannable in the app. It needs some more work (i.e. to be able to scan any printer on demand and print to that specific printer). Right now it’s just hardcoded to whatever label printer you have added to PrintNode and hardcoded in the solution.

Anyway, it is a way to print an item label to a Zebra label printer directly from the mobile app. If you put a mobile Zebra printer on Wifi, you could carry it around with you and label an entire warehouse by looking up the item in the mobile app, and then printing a label for it, for example.