Itemized Products Overview

Items in ServiceCore represent each individual unit of a certain product. Instead of just knowing that you own 50 portable toilets, itemization lets you track exactly which unit is where, who's renting it, and what condition it's in. Click here to learn more about products.

Itemization is a good fit for businesses that need to track usage, condition, and location at the individual unit level. It's common for businesses managing restroom trailers, roll-off dumpsters, or any product where knowing which specific unit was delivered or returned matters for maintenance, billing, or accountability.

Product itemization is optional. You can leave some of your products non-itemized and track them by quantity only. ServiceCore will show how many are available to rent, but won't distinguish one unit from another. 

If you've itemized a product, every unit of that product has its own unique serial number that ServiceCore uses to track which unit is tied to which rental. 

That only works as well as the habits behind it. Keep reading to learn itemized inventory is good for, how serial numbers actually behave in ServiceCore, where your records can drift from what's physically in your yard, and the routine that keeps the everything together.

Before You Start

Here are a few things to know before you continue:

• To see if you have access to this feature in ServiceCore, please check out this article on user permission levels.
• Itemization is set per product, so you can itemize some products and leave others tracked by quantity only.
• You CANNOT convert a product from itemized to non-itemized or vice versa.
• To learn more about products, click here.
• To learn how to manage your itemized products, click here.

Decide Whether to Itemize a Product

When you're deciding whether or not to itemize a product, ask yourself: will someone in your business do something differently based on which unit is involved?

If the answer is yes, you'll want to itemize the product. 

If the answer is no and the only thing you need to know is whether you have enough units to take the job, bulk tracking handles that with far less work in the field.

When To Itemize

Itemization makes sense when knowing which specific unit was delivered, serviced, or returned changes how your team(s) operate.

You'll probably want to itemize your products when:

• Maintenance and condition matter per unit. For example: you want to know that unit 4471 is the one that keeps coming back damaged.
• Units aren't really interchangeable. For example: age, configuration, or condition varies enough that it changes which one you'd use.
• You need to settle disputes. For example: if a customer says a unit arrived damaged, you need to know which unit was on that site and what shape it was in when it left your yard.
• The equipment is high-value or specialty. For example: restroom trailers, ADA units, holding tanks, and similar assets.
• You want unit-level GPS. For example: you want your driver to know exactly where to go to service the unit(s) onsite. Itemized units show up individually on the inventory map when their barcodes are scanned and/or when a PIN is added on job completion.

When to Use Bulk Tracking

Bulk tracking keeps things simple when unit identity doesn't change a decision.

You'll probably want to avoid itemizing your products when:

• Your units are genuinely interchangeable and you just need accurate counts.
• Your jobs move a lot of units at once. Every unit on an itemized job has to be individually selected or scanned during job completion and doing that for a lot of units on every single site will take the driver time to do it accurately. If they rush and don't get it right the first time, the accuracy of everything downstream will be affected too.

Before You Commit to Either Option

Before you commit to itemizing a product, keep these points in mind:

• The choice is permanent. A product can't be switched between itemized and bulk after it's created.
• Changing a unit's product erases its history. If you need to reclassify a unit, like if a standard unit becomes an ADA unit, you have to deactivate it and create it with a new serial number which means the new unit starts with no history.
• Serial numbers have to be unique across all products, including deactivated units, and you can't deactivate a unit while it's attached to a rental or job.

TIP: Itemizing everything isn't the goal. We recommend itemizing the products where unit identity changes a decision and keeping the rest on bulk tracking. Fewer itemized products means fewer scans in the field and fewer records to keep straight.

How Serial Numbers Work

Understanding what serial numbers do and don't track is key to knowing when you have a real problem and when your inventory is actually fine.

A serial number records where one specific unit was last identified. It also carries the unit's condition, usage, barcode, and history.

Serial numbers are automatically updated when:

• Someone explicitly associates it with a unit, like when a driver selects a serial number or scans a barcode when completing a job.
• Someone moves it manually using the Update Location/Check In feature, doing a yard transfer, or editing a job completion.
• A final Pick-Up is completed for all units on site. ServiceCore removes all serial numbers associated with that Pick-Up, even if not all of the serial numbers were selected.
• Someone selects a unit that's on another rental while completing a job. ServiceCore  moves it off that rental and adds a driver note with the rental number it was associated with.

Please Note: Your available product quantities will change regardless of serial number updates. When a job is completed, ServiceCore recalculates your unit counts and overall availability whether or not anyone said which specific unit was involved. The counts update based on the actual quantity associated with the completed job while the serial number log only updates when a serial number has been selected on the completed job.

The one thing you can always count on when it comes to managing your inventory in ServiceCore is that one serial number = one unit of total product quantity.

If you own 50 portable toilet units, you'll have 50 serial numbers.

How Serial Numbers Don't Work

While the one-to-one rule is solid, we see a few common assumptions about serial numbers that don't hold up:

• Serial numbers showing a yard don't add up to that yard's In Yard count.
• Serial numbers listed on a job or rental don't add up to that job/rental's quantity.

Yard counts and job/rental unit quantity are stored separately from serial numbers. They can disagree with each other, but that disagreement doesn't automatically mean that something is broken. Understanding this separation helps you avoid chasing the wrong problem when something looks off.

A serial number problem doesn't automatically mean there's an availability problem. If your availability is correct, but your serial numbers list looks off, your availability is still accurate.

Your serial number list isn't proof of what you own, it's merely a reflection of what's been individually tracked. If a unit was never identified on a job, the log still shows its last known location.

Please Note: Serial numbers can sometimes point at a problem, but not reliably enough to use them as a reliable check on your product availability.

Click here to learn how to resolve serial number errors.

Click here to learn how to resolve availability discrepancies.

How ServiceCore Tracks Your Inventory

There are three separate items ServiceCore tracks around your inventory and different actions in your account affect each item differently.

How Your Actions Affect Inventory Tracking

Not every action in ServiceCore moves all three items. Use this table to see exactly what changes and what doesn't.

There are 2 things to highlight from the table above:

1. Completing a job with serial numbers selected and transferring items across yards are the only routine actions that keep all three items aligned. Everything else either changes product quantities without updating the serial number locations or changes serial number locations without updating product quantities.
2. Updating a serial number's location and a Pick-Up job aren't the same. Updating the location corrects where the system thinks a specific unit is. A Pick-Up job both updates the unit's location AND changes your availability too. If a unit is back in your yard, a Pick-Up job is the right action to take.

Where Your Records Start to Drift

Your records in ServiceCore will stop matching your actual inventory the first time a job is completed without a serial number selected. 

Here's how one skipped scan turns into a bigger problem:

1. The quantity moves, but no specific unit is tied to the rental. The unit's location record still says it's in your yard even though it's out on a site.
2. Because the system thinks it's in the yard, that unit still shows up in your driver's selectable list on the next rental.
3. The driver either picks it (which creates a second wrong association) or spends time hunting for the unit that's actually supposed to be there.
4. Your map and GPS data are now stale. Trying to figure out where your units are becomes frustrating with incorrect information.
5. Every wrong pick makes the next one harder to get right.

Because errors in inventory tracking quickly compound into a larger problem, you want to catch these early before you have to clear a long backlog (or avoid them all together!).

The Everyday Causes

Most Unknown Serial Number errors come from one of these reasons:

• A job was completed without a serial number selected or the product quantity for the job was higher than the number of serial numbers selected.
• A driver selected a unit that belonged to a different rental.
• A completed Delivery job was edited and its serial numbers were removed.
• Update Location/Check In was used on a serial number that was associated to a rental.

Please Note: The Unknown Serial Number error doesn't mean something is broken; it usually means the driver didn't select a serial number during job completion. Your availability is still calculated based on the actual quantity of products tied to the job's completion.

If a service job is showing an Unknown Serial Number error, the problem almost always started earlier during the Delivery job that put the unit on that site. We always recommend looking at the upstream Delivery job first to see if something needs fixing.

Maintain Your Records

Itemized inventory stays accurate through a few short routines that are easy to implement and avoid the need for you to spend hours doing regular deep cleans of your inventory.

The Daily Check (Two Minutes)

Catching serial number gaps the day they happen is far easier than reconstructing what happened a week later.

Open your Dashboard and check the Jobs with Missing Serial Numbers list to the right. It shows the five most recently completed Delivery and Pick-Up jobs without a serial number selected.

TIP: Do this at the start or end of the day while your driver still remembers the stop.

The Weekly Digital Sweep

The daily check catches recent gaps, but a weekly look through your reports surfaces anything that slipped through.

To do this, just the instructions below:

1. Click “Reports” in the top menu.
2. Scroll down and find the Inventory Management Report listed under Operations Reports.
3. Click the name of the report or the “Open Report” icon to open and run the report.
   
   
4. Look at the Jobs with Missing Serial Numbers section first. 
   
   TIP: This holds your full and filterable jobs list, catching anything that you might have missed in your daily checks. 
   
   
5. Look at the Mismatched On-Site Inventory section next. 
   
   TIP: This is grouped by product with the reason for each mismatch.
   
   

TIP: We strongly suggest filtering the data to the last 30 days every week and clearing out any discrepancies that you find. A recent window you clear every week is worth far more than a full history you clear once. If you have a large backlog you'd like help with, please reach out to our Support team.

The Weekly Physical Audit

A physical count of your inventory can quicky confirm what ServiceCore has on record. It's the one check that catches discrepancies the system can't catch on its own.

To do that, just count your yard's products and compare that number to your In Yard number in your account, making sure that the total serial numbers in your yard = your In Yard total in ServiceCore.

If those two don't match, something needs attention. This usually comes from a Delivery or Pick-Up quantity that wasn't entered accurately. 

If the two numbers match, but individual unit locations look wrong, you have an issue with drift, not an availability count problem.

Please Note: Don't try to compare the serial numbers showing at a yard to that yard's In Yard count or try to compare the serial numbers on a rental to that rental's quantity. Those are separate records. The In Yard count is based on job completions. The serial numbers shown with a yard location are based on the selections/scans your drivers make when completing jobs.

For Deeper Investigation

When a routine check points to a more complex issue, you may need to dig into the specifics a bit more.

If you're seeing one product with problems across several rentals, we recommend working from the Rentals section in the product's details page. 

Starting here is much faster than opening rentals one at a time.

To get to a product's details page, just follow the instructions below:

1. Click on "Rentals" in the top menu.
2. Click into the "Inventory" section.
3. Click into the "Products" section.
4. Click on the product's name to open its details page.
   
   
5. Click into the "Rentals" section. 
   
   

If you're having trouble reconstructing what happened to a unit, use the Inventory History report to see that unit's full history since it's the most detailed view available in ServiceCore.

Troubleshoot and Fix Inventory Issues

Before you fix the issue, you'll need to figure out what's actually happening.

The main two inventory issues you may run into look similar at first, but they're fixed very differently.

Once you know what you're looking at, you can use the below resources to fix the most common scenarios you'll run into:

• Click here to learn how to resolve serial number errors.
• Click here to learn how to resolve availability discrepancies.

If you have any questions, please reach out to our Support team through the chat widget on the bottom of this page or by sending an email to support@servicecore.com!