Once you have added a New Machine to Vend IT the next step is to setup your machine with products.
Tap your new machine to open it
New machines will show up up with a black icon color because no products have been added yet. Tap the menu icon in the machine and then tap Edit Trays
Vend IT uses the terminology Tray for each individual drawer in the machine and Coil for each individual product in the drawer.
Snack machines may have up to 10 or more Trays / Drawers and then 6 to 10 or more Coils / Products in each Tray.
Drinks machines typically do not have Trays however we still add just one tray and then the corresponding number of Coils / Products to that single tray.
Once you have tapped Edit Trays you screen will look like below. 1 Tray will be automatically added for you. You can see here it says (NO COILS, WILL BE DELETED). This just means this tray is empty and if you do not add any coils too it the system will delete it when you save changes as it is not in use.
Add Coil Button: This is used to add a coil to your tray so you can enter product information.
Add Tray Button: This can be used to add a new tray once your have finished configuring the first tray.
In the screen below you can see I have added several trays but they are all empty.
To add a Coil / Product to a tray tap the Add Coil button in that tray you wish to add the product to.
You will see the screen below allowing you to add your product details.
Coil ID: This is the hardware ID of the coil it is often a 4 digit number and letter identifier e.g. 0034 or 01D2. The coil ID for each coil in the machine is supplied by the machine manufacturer. It may be in your manual for the machine or printed inside the machine. If you do not know your Coil IDs we have 2 methods for the app to discover them. See Article. If you do not know the Coil IDs at the time if adding products just enter a dummy value of 0 for now.
Product: Name of the product. When you select this field you will be shown a menu to select from Product Names already entered or tap the New Product button if its a new item you have not sold before or setup in the app before.
Capacity: Maximum number of items this coil can hold.
Track Expiry Dates: This is a more advanced feature for tracking expiry dates. See article. Its often better to get your machine up and running first and correctly tracking stock and then come back later to track expiry dates once you have learned how the app works.
Once you have entered your coil details tap Save.
You should now see in Tray 1 your have your first product. In this example below M&M Peanut. Coil ID (hardware ID) is 001A, there are currently zero items out of a maximum of 10 and the coil is currently 0% full.
You should now continue adding Coils and Trays until the machine is full.
Once you are done adding coils tap the menu icon and tap Finished Editing
Finished Editing closes the edit mode and saves all of your changes. The app will begin uploading those changed to your account. However to be sure this is happening you can press Update Now from the menu on the Locations screen to start the synchronization of data immediately.
There have been cases of people spending a long time adding products to the app without saving changes and their phone subsequently crashing and loosing the data. Due to this issue its a good idea to save your changes every time to enter the products for a tray.
For Example: enter all of the product data for Tray 1. Then tap Finished Editing. Then from Locations Screen tap Update Now. This will send all of that data immediately to the server. Then continue on to enter product data for Tray 2.. Finished Editing.. Update Now and so on until the machine is fully configured. This way your reduce the risk of losing any data you have entered. This issued is being addressed in a subsequent app update.
Once you have added all of your Trays and Coils you will be next ready to add the stock counts to the app.