UMSHAI Documentation

What is UMSHAI

UMSHAI is the back office for grocery and supermarket operations. It keeps your inventory accurate, warns you before stock expires, spots products that have stopped selling, tracks what suppliers owe you when deliveries come up short, and — on the Pro plan — drafts your purchase orders for you using your real sales history and the best vendor price it can find. Each store gets its own private workspace at yourstore.umshai.com, and everything below happens inside it.

Sign up & your workspace

1. Go to app.umshai.com and choose a plan (Basic or Pro, monthly or yearly). Every plan starts with a 2-month free trial — a card is required to start, but you are not charged until the trial ends, and you can cancel any time before that.
2. Pick your workspace name. This becomes your permanent address, e.g. freshmart.umshai.com.
3. Complete checkout. Your workspace is provisioned automatically and is typically live within a few minutes.
4. Check your email: your welcome email contains your workspace address and first login details. Bookmark the address — it's where you and your team will work every day.

Setting up your store Start here

Your workspace arrives with the company, Canadian taxes, user roles and sensible operating defaults already configured. What it doesn't have yet is your stores, products and stock. Work through the steps below in order — each one is what makes the next one possible. Most stores are running the same day.

Already done for you

• Your company, with Canadian currency, timezone and chart of accounts.
• Sales tax for every province and territory — see Canadian taxes.
• Roles and permissions for your whole team — see User roles.
• Operating defaults — 14-day safety stock, expiry alerts 3 days ahead, $0.20/lb freight and more, in UMSHAI Settings. Leave these alone for now; tune them once you have real data.

Step 1 — Log in and set your password

Open the welcome email, follow the link to choose a password, then log in at your workspace address (yourstore.umshai.com). You'll land on the UMSHAI workspace — the home screen described in the workspace tour. Bookmark it.

If the link has expired, use Forgot Password on your workspace login page.

Step 2 — Create a store for each location

A store in UMSHAI is a Warehouse. Stock, reorder levels, sales and suggested orders are all tracked per store, so this comes before everything else.

• Set Warehouse Name to the store's name, e.g. Main Street.
• Leave Is Group Warehouse unticked. Group warehouses are containers, not real locations — they're skipped by ordering and reports.
• Single-location business? You still need one, but you can simply rename the default Stores warehouse to your store's name instead of creating a new one.

Step 3 — Add your products

• Item Code — your SKU or barcode. This is the code you'll use in sales imports and vendor catalogs, so use what your POS already uses.
• Item Name, Item Group and Default Unit of Measure (each, case, kg…).
• Leave Maintain Stock ticked.
• Inventory tab → Weight Per Unit. Set this in pounds if you're on Pro: it's what lets UMSHAI compare vendors on true landed cost rather than sticker price.
• Perishable? On the Inventory tab tick Has Batch No and Automatically Create New Batch. This is what turns on expiry tracking for that product.

Step 4 — Load your opening stock

1. Create a new Stock Reconciliation and set Purpose to Opening Stock.
2. Add a row per product per store: Item Code, Warehouse, Quantity on hand, and Valuation Rate (what the unit costs you).
3. For batch-tracked products, enter the Batch No and its expiry date so the Expiry Board is accurate from day one.
4. Submit. Your quantities now show in the Stock Balance report.

Step 5 — Set a re-order level for every product, in every store

Add one row per store:

• Request for — the store (warehouse).
• Re-order Level — the minimum number of units you want on that shelf.
• Material Request Type — Purchase.

Step 6 — Invite your team

Enter their email and name, then set their Role Profile — UMSHAI Store Manager, UMSHAI Staff Member, UMSHAI Viewer, or UMSHAI Store Admin for another back-office lead. They receive an email to set their own password. See User roles for what each one can do.

Step 7 — Start feeding in sales

UMSHAI learns how fast each product sells from your recorded sales. Until sales exist, slow-mover alerts have nothing to compare and suggested order quantities cover only the gap back to your re-order level. Two paths, both fine:

• Ring sales through UMSHAI as Sales Invoices, or
• upload a CSV export from your POS — see Importing sales data for the exact format.

If you already have the last few weeks of sales from your POS, import them now. The sales history you load is what UMSHAI reads, so a back-dated import means useful suggestions immediately instead of after a fortnight of waiting.

Then, on Pro: switch on automated ordering Pro

Steps 1–7 give you a running store. These four add the automation.

1. Add your suppliers — search for Supplier and create one per vendor.
2. Tell UMSHAI who supplies what — workspace → Item Vendor Mapping. One record per item + vendor, carrying Case Size, MOQ, Lead Time (days), Last Unit Cost and Weight / Unit (lb). Tick Preferred Vendor to always favour one supplier for that item.
3. Or let UMSHAI do the matching — enter the vendor's price list as a Vendor Catalog and UMSHAI matches each line to your products for you; confirm the matches in Catalog Review and every confirmation writes the mapping. Mappings are also refreshed automatically every time you confirm an Invoice OCR job.
4. Optional finishing touches — record each vendor's order deadline, and flag anything seasonal with a Seasonal SKU Flag so it's ordered ahead of its season.

From then on, suggested orders are drafted for you daily, one set per store per supplier, and your store managers are notified.

Why is nothing showing up yet?

Every one of these is a normal first-week question, and each has a one-line fix.

User roles

UMSHAI ships with five roles so each person on your team sees exactly what they need. The owner account created at signup is a Store Admin — full control of the business, including inviting the rest of the team from Settings → Users.

Plans: Basic vs Pro

Basic covers the essentials for a single store. Pro adds the automation that protects your margin. Sections below are tagged Basic or Pro so you always know what your plan includes.

Upgrades unlock features immediately — see Billing & account.

Workspace tour

After logging in you land on the UMSHAI workspace — the home screen with shortcuts to everything in this guide:

• Suggested Orders — today's drafted orders, ready for review (Pro)
• Catalog Review — match vendor catalog products to your items (Pro)
• Expiry Board — stock that's expiring, soonest first
• Slow Movers — products that have stopped selling
• Item Vendor Mappings — which vendors supply each item, at what cost
• Supplier Claims — money owed to you for short deliveries
• Order Deadlines — vendor cut-off times and reminders (Pro)
• UMSHAI Settings — tenant-wide configuration

You can also reach anything from the search bar at the top of every page — start typing "expiry", "supplier claim", or an item name and jump straight there.

How the sidebar works

The menu down the left of every page is your whole system. UMSHAI is built on a full business platform, so alongside the grocery tools we wrote for you there are standard accounting, purchasing and stock menus. We've already hidden the parts that have nothing to do with running a store — what's left is what follows.

Every menu page is laid out the same way: a chart or two at the top, then coloured tiles for the things you open most, then cards grouping everything else. Not everyone sees every menu — each section below says who does.

UMSHAI All roles

Your home screen and the only menu that is entirely ours. Every grocery-specific feature in this guide starts from one of these tiles. The page is two rows of tiles with no cards, so what you see here is everything it holds.

What you'll use most

• Suggested Orders — the daily drafted orders you review and confirm (how they're calculated).
• Expiry Board — what's about to go out of date, soonest first.
• Supplier Claims — money your suppliers owe you.

Everything in this menu

Accounting Managers only

Your books. Most store owners live in the reports and leave the setup alone — your company, chart of accounts, fiscal year and every Canadian tax template were configured when your workspace was created. The top of the page shows a profit-and-loss chart and four running totals: bills out, bills in, payments in, payments out.

What you'll use most

• Sales Invoice and Purchase Invoice — what you billed and what you were billed.
• Payment Entry — recording money in and out.
• General Ledger and Trial Balance — the two reports your accountant will ask for.

Everything in this menu

Accounting → Payables

Everything about money you owe suppliers. Tiles: Purchase Invoice, Payment Entry, Journal Entry, Accounts Payable.

Accounting → Receivables

The mirror image: money owed to you. Most grocery sales are paid at the till, so stores that don't run accounts for customers barely touch this. Tiles: Sales Invoice, POS Invoice, Payment Entry, Journal Entry, Accounts Receivable, Cost Center.

Accounting → Financial Reports

Read-only reporting. This is where you or your accountant come at month end. No tiles — four cards of reports.

Buying All roles

Suppliers and purchase orders — the manual side of ordering. On Pro, most orders arrive here already drafted by suggested ordering, and you use this menu to check and send them. The page opens with a purchase-order trend chart.

What you'll use most

• Purchase Order — create, print or email an order (how ordering works).
• Supplier — add a vendor before you can order from them.
• Items to Order and Receive — what's outstanding right now.

Everything in this menu

Selling Not Staff

The sales side: who you sell to, at what price, and on what promotion. If your sales arrive by CSV import you'll spend little time here — but this is where prices and promotions are set. The page opens with a sales trend chart.

What you'll use most

• Item Price and Price List — what you charge.
• Pricing Rule — time-boxed promotions (how they expire safely).
• Sales Analytics — what's selling.

Everything in this menu

Stock All roles

Products, stores and quantities — the foundation everything else reads from. This is where you set products up during first-run setup and where you check what's actually on the shelf. The page opens with total stock value, warehouse and item counts, and a stock-value-per-store chart.

What you'll use most

• Item — create products and set re-order levels.
• Warehouse — your stores.
• Stock Balance — what's on hand right now, per store.
• Purchase Receipt — taking a delivery in.

Everything in this menu

Users Store Admin only

Your team and what each person can reach. Adding someone is a two-field job — email and role profile — and the rest of this menu exists for the rare occasion you need to look up who changed something.

What you'll use most

• User — add someone, or switch off access when they leave.
• Role Profile — the bundle that decides what they see; see User roles.

Everything in this menu

Tools All roles

General-purpose bits that come with the platform. Nothing here is grocery-specific, but the to-do list is genuinely useful for handing work between shifts.

Everything in this menu

Inventory management Basic

Your live catalog of products, stores, and stock levels — the foundation every other feature builds on.

Set up your products

1. Create an Item for each product you stock (name, item code, unit, and — for anything perishable — enable batch tracking with an expiry date, see Expiry tracking).
2. Each physical store is a Warehouse. Multi-store businesses see stock per store everywhere in the app.
3. On each item, set a reorder level per store — the minimum quantity you want on the shelf. This is your safety stock, and it's what Suggested ordering defends.

Day to day

• Stock goes up when you receive purchases (Purchase Receipt) and down when you record sales through UMSHAI, move stock between stores, or write off waste. Sales brought in through CSV import are historical data — they update sales velocity but deliberately don't change stock on hand.
• Check any item's current quantity per store in the Stock Balance report.
• Every change is tracked with who-did-what history on the record.

Expiry tracking & alerts Basic

UMSHAI watches every batch with an expiry date, warns you while there is still time to act, and refuses to let expired stock be sold.

• Batch tracking: for perishable items, enter the batch and its expiry date when receiving stock. That's the only manual step.
• Expiry Board: a live report of all batches nearing expiry — item, store, batch, quantity, days left — soonest first. Use it to plan markdowns, transfers, or returns before the loss happens.
• Alerts: UMSHAI emails a warning as batches approach expiry. You won't get duplicate nags for the same batch.
• Hard stop at the till: an expired batch cannot be sold — sales invoices and delivery notes that include one are blocked with a clear message naming the batch, protecting you from selling expired goods by accident.

Slow-mover alerts Basic

Shelf space is money. UMSHAI flags products whose sales have dried up so you can discount, relocate, or stop reordering them.

• The Slow Movers report lists items that haven't sold (or have barely sold) over the review window, per store, alongside the stock still on hand.
• Alerts are sent automatically so slow stock gets noticed without anyone remembering to run the report.
• Sales velocity comes from your recorded sales — see Importing sales data to keep it accurate.

Supplier claims Basic

When a delivery arrives short, that difference is money your supplier owes you. UMSHAI catches it at the receiving dock and tracks it until it's settled.

• Automatic claims: when you receive a purchase order and the delivered quantity is less than what's still owed on the order, UMSHAI creates a Supplier Claim for the shortfall automatically — one claim per shortage, no duplicates.
• Manual claims: you can also raise a claim yourself for damaged goods or pricing disputes.
• Follow-up: each claim carries the supplier, items, quantities, and value. Send the branded claim email to the supplier straight from the record, and update the status as it's resolved.

Purchase orders Basic

Create and send purchase orders to your vendors, then receive against them so shortages are caught automatically.

1. Create a Purchase Order: pick the supplier, add items and quantities, and submit. (On Pro, Suggested ordering drafts these for you.)
2. Print or email the branded PO PDF — a clean, professional document with your letterhead — directly from the order.
3. When the truck arrives, create a Purchase Receipt against the order. Stock goes up, and any shortfall automatically becomes a Supplier Claim.

Importing sales data (CSV) Basic

UMSHAI learns how fast each product sells from your sales records — that's what powers slow-mover alerts and suggested ordering. If your point-of-sale system isn't connected, upload sales as a simple CSV export instead.

How it works

1. Export your sales from your POS as a CSV file.
2. Open Sales Import, choose the file (or paste its contents), and press Validate. Nothing is written yet — this is a dry run that tells you what the file would do and names anything it doesn't recognise.
3. When the preview is clean, press Import. The Import button stays disabled until a validation passes, so a bad file can't be half-imported.

UMSHAI groups your rows into one sales record per store per day and updates each item's sales velocity. Import at whatever rhythm suits you — daily is ideal, weekly works. Available to Store Admin and Store Manager.

CSV file format — full reference Basic

Everything that determines whether your sales file imports successfully. If you're setting up an export from your POS or writing the file yourself, this is the section to follow.

Start from the template

The safest start is a file with the header row already correct:

⬇ Download blank template

Open it in Excel or Google Sheets, fill in your rows, and save as CSV.

A complete example

Two products sold at one store on one day, and one product at another store the next day:

date,store,item_code,qty,rate
2026-07-01,Main Street - FM,SKU-1042,6,4.99
2026-07-01,Main Street - FM,SKU-2210,2,12.50
2026-07-02,Riverside - FM,SKU-1042,11,4.99

That's a valid file exactly as shown. Three rows, two stores, two dates.

The columns

The rules

• A header row is required, and the names must be spelled exactly as above.
• Header names must be lower-case. Date, Store, Item_Code, Qty is rejected — use date, store, item_code, qty.
• Column order doesn't matter. Columns are matched by name, so store,date,qty,item_code works as well as the order shown above.
• Extra columns are ignored. You do not need to strip your POS export down — see below.
• Commas only. Semicolon-separated files (Excel produces these in some regional settings) are rejected with a message telling you to re-save.
• Spaces after commas are fine, and so is the invisible marker Excel adds to the start of a CSV file. Files saved straight out of Excel work as-is.
• Blank rows at the end are skipped, so trailing empty lines are harmless.
• All-or-nothing. If any row fails, nothing is imported — you fix the file and upload again. There's no partial import to unpick.

Extra columns from your POS

Your export almost certainly carries more than the five columns UMSHAI needs — invoice numbers, descriptions, payment breakdowns. Leave them in. UMSHAI reads only the five columns it recognises and ignores the rest:

invoice,date,store,item_code,description,qty,rate,cash,credit card,debit card
INV-001,2026-07-01,Main Street - FM,SKU-1042,Whole Milk 2L,6,4.99,10.00,0,0
INV-002,2026-07-01,Main Street - FM,SKU-2210,Bread White,2,12.50,0,25.00,0

That file imports exactly like the shorter one — the same two sales, with invoice, description, cash, credit card and debit card read and discarded.

One row per till transaction is also fine. If a product was sold five separate times at one store on one day, five rows is correct — UMSHAI adds them up.

What happens when you import

• Rows are grouped by date and store — one sales record per store per day, containing every product sold that day.
• Each product's sales velocity is updated. That's what slow-mover alerts and suggested ordering read.
• Your stock levels are not changed. Imported sales are historical data for analysis — they deliberately don't deduct from stock on hand, so importing last month's sales can't drive your shelf quantities negative. Stock is adjusted by receipts, stock entries and reconciliations.
• Importing the same file twice creates the sales twice. If you re-upload, use a file covering only the days you haven't imported yet.

If the import is refused

Every message names the problem and where it is. The common ones:

Suggested ordering Pro

Every day, UMSHAI drafts the purchase orders each store needs — you review and confirm instead of building them from scratch.

How a suggestion is calculated

• What's running low: any item below its reorder level (your safety stock) at that store.
• How much to order: enough to refill back to the reorder level, plus what you'll sell while waiting for delivery — average daily sales × the vendor's lead time.
• Real-world quantities: quantities are rounded up to full cases and bumped to the vendor's minimum order quantity where needed.
• Best vendor: when several vendors supply an item, UMSHAI picks the one with the lowest landed cost — unit price plus freight by weight — not just the lowest sticker price.
• Seasonal items: items flagged with a Seasonal SKU Flag are added ahead of their season even if they haven't started selling yet.

Your daily routine

1. Store managers are notified when new suggestions are ready — one suggestion set per store per day.
2. Open the Suggested Order: each line shows the item, current stock, safety stock, sales velocity, suggested quantity, and the chosen vendor with its cost.
3. Adjust any line, drop what you don't want, then confirm to turn it into a real Purchase Order.

Vendor catalogs & price comparison Pro

Load your vendors' price lists once, and UMSHAI keeps a live map of who sells each of your items and what it truly costs — the engine behind best-vendor selection.

How it works

1. Add a Vendor Catalog with the vendor's product lines — name, size, unit cost, case size, weight. You enter these once per price list; UMSHAI does the matching from there.
2. UMSHAI's matcher compares each catalog line to your items — tolerant of naming differences ("Coke 355ml can" vs "Coca-Cola Can 355 mL") but strict about size, so a 355 ml can never matches a 2 L bottle.
3. Confident matches are queued in Catalog Review with a suggested item. Confirm (or correct) each one; every confirmation saves an Item Vendor Mapping — vendor, cost, case size, lead time — for that item.

Landed cost

Comparisons use landed cost: unit cost plus the item's weight × the vendor's freight rate. A heavier product from a "cheaper" vendor can genuinely cost more by the time it reaches your dock — UMSHAI accounts for that. Items missing a weight are flagged for review rather than compared unfairly.

Invoice OCR Pro

Instead of typing a vendor invoice line by line, upload the PDF and UMSHAI reads it for you — supplier, invoice number, dates, every line item, and the total.

1. Create a new OCR Import Job and attach the invoice PDF. Extraction starts the moment you save.
2. In a few moments the job returns as Needs Review with every line extracted — descriptions, quantities, prices — plus a sum check that verifies the lines add up to the invoice total. A mismatch is your cue to look closer.
3. Review the lines, fix anything the scan got wrong, then press Confirm.
4. UMSHAI creates a draft Purchase Receipt from the invoice, ready for you to check and submit — and updates your vendor mappings with the latest costs from that invoice.

Invoice OCR — full reference Pro

Everything the invoice reader does, in the order you'll meet it.

Before you start

• Plan: Pro. On Basic the job is created but immediately fails with "Invoice OCR requires the Pro plan."
• Who can use it: Store Admin and Store Manager can create and confirm jobs. Staff Members and Viewers can look but not upload or confirm.
• File type: PDF only. Photos and scans saved as JPG or PNG are rejected — if you only have a photo, print or convert it to PDF first.
• Size limit: 20 MB per file.
• Multi-page invoices are supported and their pages are merged into one result.
• The products on the invoice must already exist as Items in UMSHAI. OCR never creates products.

Step by step

1. Create the job. Workspace → Invoice OCR → new OCR Import Job. Attach the invoice PDF. You can set the Supplier now, or leave it — UMSHAI tries to work it out from the invoice.
2. Save. Extraction starts automatically; the status moves Queued → Processing.
3. Wait. A one-page invoice is usually back in 10–20 seconds; long multi-page ones take longer. The status becomes Needs Review when it's done.
4. Review. Check the header fields and each line — details below.
5. Confirm. Press the Confirm button on the job.

Statuses

What gets extracted

At the top of the invoice:

• Invoice No and Invoice Date
• Grand Total
• Supplier — UMSHAI matches the vendor name on the invoice against your existing suppliers, first exactly and then partially. If it can't tell, the field is left empty for you to fill in. It never creates a new supplier.

For each line:

The sum check

UMSHAI adds up the extracted lines and compares them to the invoice's own total. When they agree, Sum Check OK is ticked. When they don't, it's left clear — and that's a genuine signal worth acting on. It usually means one of two things:

• the invoice carries charges that aren't products — delivery, fuel surcharge, deposits — which is normal and fine to confirm; or
• a line was misread, in which case fix it before confirming.

A clear sum check never blocks you. It asks you to look.

How lines are matched to your products

• If the supplier is known, UMSHAI matches against that supplier's existing product mappings first — which is why matching gets noticeably better after your first few invoices from a vendor.
• With no supplier or no mappings yet, it matches against your whole product list.
• Matching tolerates naming differences but is strict about size, so a 355 ml can never matches a 2 L bottle.
• A confident match is filled in and left unflagged; anything less confident is filled in but has Review ticked. The thresholds are yours to tune in UMSHAI Settings (Fuzzy Auto-Match ≥ and Fuzzy Review ≥).

What Confirm does

Confirm refuses unless all three are true: the job is in Needs Review, a Supplier is set, and every line has a Matched Item. It then:

1. Creates a draft Purchase Receipt for that supplier, one row per line, using Qty Shipped and Unit Price.
2. Creates or refreshes an Item Vendor Mapping for every line — vendor SKU, case size from the pack size, and the unit price as the latest known cost. This is what keeps suggested ordering costing your orders accurately.
3. Marks the job Confirmed and links the receipt.

Limits and repeat runs

• An invoice extracting more than 1,000 lines is refused.
• A job waits up to 15 minutes for a result. If the service is interrupted mid-extraction, a background check flips the job to Failed within about half an hour rather than leaving it stuck on Processing.
• Once a job reaches Needs Review its extracted lines are fixed — a second result for the same job is ignored, so nothing can quietly rewrite what you're about to confirm.
• A Confirmed job can't be confirmed again or overwritten. To redo one, upload the invoice as a new job.
• Raw Provider Response at the bottom of the job holds exactly what the reader returned. You'll never need it, but it's what our support team will ask for.

What it doesn't do

• It doesn't submit the Purchase Receipt — a person always does that.
• It doesn't create products or suppliers. Every line must match an Item that already exists.
• It doesn't read price lists or vendor catalogs — those are entered as a Vendor Catalog, and UMSHAI matches their lines to your products for you.
• It doesn't file the invoice for payment. The draft receipt records the goods; the bill is a separate Purchase Invoice.

If something goes wrong

Order deadline calendar Pro

Most vendors have a cut-off — order by Tuesday 2pm or wait a week. Miss it and the shelf sits empty. UMSHAI remembers every deadline for you.

• Record each vendor's Order Deadline — when orders are due and how much advance notice you want.
• UMSHAI emails a reminder ahead of each deadline, once — no duplicate nags.
• Pairs naturally with Suggested ordering: the reminder arrives, the drafted order is already waiting.

Promotions engine Pro

Run time-boxed price promotions without the morning-after problem: when a promotion's end date passes, UMSHAI switches it off automatically, so last month's discount can never leak into today's prices.

• Create a Pricing Rule for the promotion — items, discount, and validity dates.
• While valid, the promotional price applies automatically to sales.
• Expired promotions are disabled automatically every day — nothing to remember.

Canadian taxes All plans

Canadian sales tax is set up out of the box — nothing to configure:

• Every province and territory: GST, HST, PST, and QST templates are preloaded, and the right one is applied automatically based on the transaction's province.
• Zero-rated groceries: basic groceries are handled as zero-rated, as CRA requires, while taxable items charge tax normally.
• Each tax posts to its own ledger account, so GST/HST and QST filings are straightforward for your accountant.

iOS app Coming soon

The UMSHAI iOS app — your full workspace, on your phone — is in final review for the App Store. When it launches: install, enter your workspace name (the same yourstore from yourstore.umshai.com), and log in with your usual credentials. Until then, your workspace works well in Safari on iPhone and iPad.

Billing & account All plans

• Trial: 2 months, full access to your chosen plan. Your card is only charged when the trial ends; cancel before then and you pay nothing. We email you 3 days before it ends, so the first charge is never a surprise.
• Upgrading: moving Basic → Pro unlocks Pro features immediately. Contact support@umshai.com and we'll adjust your subscription.
• If a payment fails: your workspace enters a grace period — core inventory features keep working while Pro automation pauses. Update your card and everything resumes.
• Cancelling: any time. Your subscription runs to the end of the paid period and doesn't renew.
• Your data: each store's data lives in its own isolated database, hosted in North America and backed up nightly.
• Support: support@umshai.com — we answer signup, import, and how-do-I questions alike.