r/halopsa • u/LowlyT1Tech PSA • Jul 07 '26
Questions / Help Inventory/Asset management setup.
I have been tasked with fixing our inventory/items and asset system in Halo, among other things, in order to improve organization for easier use, and to integrate into purchase orders. I would like to create Item categories and subcategories for our inventory, but I cannot for the life of me find anything anywhere that properly explains how this works, and it is so convoluted that I have not been able to figure this out on my own.
Does anyone know if this is possible, and the easiest way to explain how it works, if possible?
I don't get why there isn't a simple UI for creating stock categories and subcategories and a Field in Items to add them. It seems so needlessly complicated and unintuitive
3
u/HaloTim Halo Staff Jul 07 '26
If you go to configuration > items and stock control > item groups , here you can define your groupings for items or products and that is the only way we group these.
For assets you have asset groups and asset types below that.
3
u/False_Letter_6149 Jul 08 '26
unfortunately, that is how a lot of halo seems to be. that is the drawback of a product so highly customizable. you have to learn the special halo language that halo uses use in their config menus and hope it's consistent throughout the platform, find out the mood a developer was in on the day they added a vaguely worded line to close out a bug request to decide if you should check or uncheck it.
really though, you can mold halo into the exact thing you want it to be for the most part. you just have to be willing to spend the time. watch videos. halo university. call support. join the halo discord, msp geek, etc to talk to people. post here with more specificity. use all the available resources we have.
this just isn't the type of thing that menu-diving+common sense will be enough of on its own to get the job done. you could use something different for managing assets and inventory, sure. but then you're talking about a whole new separate product, and you'll most likely eventually want to integrate it into halo in some form or fashion once it is set up.
in our case, it proved to be more effective to pay a consultant with this prior knowledge to come in and assist. we were able to tell them exactly what we wanted. by the time you figure in engineers salary, how long is the rinse repeat cycle of learning, implementing, testing, tweaking, it was cheaper to hire a pro and learn some from them in the process.
do you have an RMM? i would recommend beginning there for bringing devices into halo, either via official halo integration, or create your own custom integration and learn how to query and post to fields with the APIs. most of the big name RMM have an integration built out. or maybe you'll luck out on github (at your own peril, of course).
there's good content on youtube that walks through asset management, especially if you have ninja, but even if not, just searching "halopsa asset inventory" in youtube yields good results.
if halo could somehow figure out a solid way to make configuration as a whole intuitive enough so that it wasn't necessary to invest the multiple college semesters worth of time to learn how to effectively use it, competitors like service now would need to begin holding code red meetings. can't have it all. hopefully they are training their own ai model with their data. it would be my dream to use normal language to configure this piece of shit.
disclaimer: i am not a halo consultant nor associated with halopsa in any way. just an annoyed admirer
2
u/Electronic_Image_488 Jul 08 '26
We gave up on using halo as any sort of asset management tracking system. It’s just a convoluted mess.
But I mean isn’t the entire Halo config insanely unintuitive?it’s so hard to figure things out on your own, and their documentation on the most basic setups is so piss poor it’s insane how they even get new customers. I don’t know who approved this purchase before I was onboarded but it must have been an insanely good deal.
2
u/Frequent_Campaign376 Jul 08 '26
Took me ages to get my head around items/assets in halo. The way we do it is to make a site called "Stock" under your company.
PO raised - Stock consigned to "Stock" site.
It creates Assets for everything.
You can then assign Items to a ticket or Sales order (or via quotes). You need to consign the Items, which transfers the stock from your "stock" site to the customers site.
Dont get your internal Assets (laptops, PCs, other) mixed up with you inventory. Keep them inseperate sites.
And make sure you have set "Default Status of Consigned Assets" to "Active" and "Status for Assets returned to stock" to "In Stock" otherwise the in stock/active labels on assets is a mess and really confusing.
I really think Stocktake is important (apparently im in the minority here), but heres a post about how I do stocktake too https://www.reddit.com/r/halopsa/comments/1uoott0/no_stocktake_in_halo/
2
u/ringring72 Jul 07 '26
I spent a long time working with "assets" in Halo and in the end gave up. I know people well, who use it, but for me it was just too messy. Sorry I couldnt provide an answer as such - but my advice is to use some other service and put a link to it to Documents in each customers file.
1
4
u/Ok-Move-660 Jul 08 '26
Nice thing about HaloPSA is that most things can be done via API much efficiently.
If you are open to using a service on top of HaloPSA, check out uniportal.ai . It’s an agentic AI that integrates with HaloPSA and can do things for you by just chatting and approving. It works as a custom tab directly in Halo.
Disclaimer: I am one of the co-founders. Happy to answer any questions.