How to Get Notified by Slack and Email When Inventory Runs Out – no code required
Inventory management can be a chore. It’s quite difficult to keep track of every item and, sometimes, even when something runs out you won’t find out until it’s too late. That’s why notifications are so important: this way, you can take immediate action, or at least have a reminder so you can get back to solving this issue when the dust settles.
We’ll teach you how to create an inventory database that automatically notifies you when an item runs out of stock.
Platforms used:
Time to build the tool ⏱:
- 3’37” on average.
5 steps to Get Notified by Slack and Email When Inventory Runs Out – no code required
1. Step One: Creating your inventory list.
Create a table in Jestor, name it “Inventory”, and add all the fields you deem important for proper inventory management. Usually, this will include things such as a description, category and, more importantly, quantity in stock. The idea here is to have an easy to use database so that you always have up to date, reliable information.
Tip: There are a lot of ways you can actually automate things even further. For example, you could automate your sales process to automatically subtract items from inventory when they’re sold. In this post, however, we’ll focus on the communication part of the process!
2. Step Two: Creating your automation.
Open the tricks panel (by clicking on the bunny in the hat icon) and create a new trick. Give it a name and description so you can later identify this trick should you need to edit or deactivate it.
Now, as the trigger for this automation, select When a field is changed. In this example, what we’re going to do is send an email and a Slack message when an item’s quantity drops to zero. Select the “Inventory” table, as a condition choose the field Quantity, then write in the value “0”.
3. Step Three: Sending an automatic Email.
Choose the “Gmail – Send email” action. Connect your Google account and set up the email by filling in all the required fields. You can do so by writing in things directly, by using information from Jestor, or a mix of both. In this case, we’ll go with:
- To: we’ll send the email to ourselves, so type in your own email address. Alternatively, you could also email an internal distribution list to make sure every necessary person receives the email (for example, if you set up something like [email protected]).
- Subject: we’ll write “{{inventory.name}} has run out!” to get a dynamic subject that reflects the item.
- Message: just as the subject, we’ll make sure the message is dynamic by using something like: “Oh, no! It seems {{inventory.name}} has run out of stock. Please fill in an order with the appropriate vendor.”
4. Step Four: Setting up a Slack alert.
While getting an automatic email is great, it may not be seen until later in the day. That’s ok for non urgent purchases, but you want to make sure urgent ones are seen immediately! Setting up a Slack alert is a great way of knowing something has run out as soon as it happens.
Choose the “Slack – Send a message in a channel” action. Connect your Slack account and choose the channel the alert will be sent to. Now, type in the message that you want to receive by using a mix of fixed text and dynamic information.
We’ll go with: “Urgent: {{inventory.name}} has run out!”
5. Step Five: Testing your automation to make sure everything is working as planned.
Create a new inventory entry with a random quantity. Now, change this quantity to zero. If you’ve set up everything right, two things should’ve happened:
- You should have received an email, as set up in step three.
- You should have received a Slack message email, as set up in step four.
Now, you don’t have to worry about manually counting each item or only getting important information by the end of the day. You’ll be notified as soon as something runs out, so you can act accordingly. As we’ve said before, there’s a lot of other ways you can also automate the inventory list to make the process even more useful. Why don’t you give it a try? ?♂️