Inventory: FileMaker Pro 12 Starter Solution

The Inventory Starter Solution is a quick way to monitor your business' products and services details, location, and costing information. It's one of the 16 pre-made templates that's available for you to start using for your database requirements. It's fully unlocked so you can view and modify the database tables, relationships, layouts, and scripts.

When you start out FileMaker Pro 12, just click File > New From Starter Solution… and select Inventory. Type the name you want for the database (in case you'll have multiple inventory databases), specify where you want to save it, and click Choose.

You'll be presented a new record where you can begin typing in the inventory details, such as Category, Manufacturer, Item and Model details, Part numbers, location and costing. You can also drag a picture of the item for reference. There's a transaction list at the bottom right part of the database screen where you can enter information about incoming and outgoing stocks. The database will automatically compute the available stock you have based on this.

The Inventory List view.

Clicking the Inventory List button shows you a list of all Items you've created, with an option to sort it by Item, Date Entered, Category, Manufacturer, or Location. You can also import and export item records to any of the file formats supported by FileMaker Pro, and print out all the records you're viewing.

The Inventory Report.

Aside from the professionally designed templates that look great on the desktop version of FileMaker Pro 12 (for Macintosh or Windows), additional layouts for FileMaker Go 12 for iOS and built-in scripts in the Starter Solution automatically show the best layout based on your mobile device (either iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch). Here's what the iPad layout looks like:

Inventory List view in iPad.

Inventory Detail view in iPad.

Item Transaction view in iPad.

You can work with this starter solution in your iOS device in several ways:

• You can sync it with your iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch using iTunes.
• You can email the file to your iOS device and open it with FileMaker Go 12.
• You can enable FileMaker Network Sharing in FileMaker Pro 12, and open the file remotely using FileMaker Go 12.

Enjoy!