Frequently asked questions (FAQ)
The questions we hear most often, from evaluating KURAPRO to running it day to day. If a term is unfamiliar, the glossary is next door.
Getting started
Q. What is KURAPRO?
A. A cloud inventory management system for small and mid-sized businesses, stores and on-site teams. From a PC, smartphone (iOS / Android) or tablet you can register products, record inbound, outbound and stocktaking, keep stock counts accurate automatically, tally cost and gross profit, and get stock alerts — all in one place. → What you can do with KURAPRO
Q. How long does it take to get started?
A. Registration takes about 5 minutes and you can start immediately. There’s no equipment to buy or install — the browser on your existing phone or PC, or the app, is enough. → First-time setup
Q. Can I try it for free?
A. Yes. The free plan covers up to 50 products, 1 user and 1 site with the core features. Try it first and switch to a paid plan when you need to.
Q. Do I need a dedicated barcode scanner?
A. No. Your phone’s camera is the scanner. → Scanning barcodes
Pricing, plans and payment
Q. What are the pricing plans?
A. Alongside the free plan there are three paid plans — Starter, Business and Premium — differing in how many products, users and sites you can have. The core inventory features are on every plan including free; AI data analysis is on the paid plans. Current prices and limits are on the website. → Plan
Q. Does “number of products” mean the number of items in stock?
A. No — it’s the number of distinct products (SKUs) you can register. Ten identical white medium T-shirts count as one product.
Q. Can I move from the free plan to a paid one?
A. Yes, any time from “Other” → “Plan.” All your data carries over. → Plan
Q. What if I run out of products or users?
A. As well as upgrading, add-ons let you increase products, users and sites individually.
Q. Can I have multiple sites (warehouses, stores)?
A. Yes. The limit depends on your plan — 1 on Starter, 3 on Business, 5 on Premium — and the “Additional site” add-on raises it further. → Sites
Q. What payment methods can I use?
A. Credit cards, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay. Payments are processed by Stripe, which holds PCI DSS Level 1 certification; card details are never stored on KURAPRO’s servers.
Q. Can I cancel any time? What happens to my data?
A. Yes, any time. Cancelling a paid plan doesn’t delete anything — you’re downgraded to the free plan and your data is kept. If you’re over the free plan’s limits, you’ll see a notice when you try to add something new. Subscribe again and everything is there.
Inventory basics
Q. How do stock counts change?
A. By recording transactions — inbound, outbound, stocktaking. Register one as “scheduled” and complete it when it actually happens, and stock updates then. → Inbound, outbound, move and stocktaking
Q. What’s the difference between inbound, outbound, move and stocktaking?
A. Inbound increases stock (purchases), outbound decreases it (sales, disposal), move changes the location, lot or expiry of stock within the same site, and stocktaking takes the count you made and corrects the difference automatically. Damage, loss and rounding are recorded as a stocktaking too. → Inbound, outbound, move and stocktaking
Q. How does stocktaking work?
A. Enter the actual count you made. KURAPRO works out the difference against current stock and corrects it. You never calculate the delta yourself.
Q. Can stock go negative?
A. That’s the “Negative stock” company setting. The default is “not allowed,” so outbound beyond available stock can’t be completed. Switch it to “allowed” and transactions may take stock below zero. → Company settings
Q. Entering the same transaction every month is tedious.
A. Open a past transaction and use Copy and create from the “⋮” menu — every line comes across. Copies are always created as “scheduled” so you can check before completing (stocktakings can’t be copied). → Scheduled, completed and history
Q. I want to register lots of similar products.
A. Use Copy and create from the “⋮” menu on a product’s detail screen. Product name, SKU and barcode can’t be duplicated, so change those before saving. → Registering and editing products
Q. Can I create purchase orders and delivery notes?
A. Yes. Inbound produces a purchase order and outbound a delivery note, as PDFs. You can set the issue date, tax type, tax rate, honorific, printable fields and remarks, and the recipient is filled in from the client. Outbound can also produce a picking list. → Purchase orders, delivery notes and picking lists
Location, lot and expiry
Q. Can I manage stock by lot number?
A. Yes. Turn on Lot and the same product’s stock is split by lot, giving you lot-level tracking and traceability. → Location, lot and expiry
Q. Can I manage stock by expiry (best-before) date?
A. Yes. Turn on Expiry and stock is split by date. The breakdown is ordered soonest-expiry-first, so first-in-first-out works straight down the list, and expired stock shows up in stock alerts.
Q. Can I manage several warehouses or stores together?
A. Yes. Places you run independently are separated as sites, and shelves, rooms or floors within a site are distinguished by location. Everything is managed centrally in real time. → Sites
Q. What’s the difference between a “site” and a “location”?
A. A site is the large unit that holds its own stock — stock, transactions and reports are separated per site (products, clients and members are shared). A location is where something sits inside one site. Separate “Tokyo warehouse” and “Osaka warehouse” as sites, and “Shelf A” and “Shelf B” within them as locations. → Sites
Q. Do I have to use location, lot and expiry from the start?
A. No. All three are off initially and stock is simply counted per product. Turn on only what you come to need. Each one becomes a field you fill in on every transaction, so keep it to a minimum.
Q. How do I move stock between locations?
A. Use the Move transaction type (when location, lot or expiry is on). Choose the source stock, then the destination and the quantity to move, and stock moves within the same site. Lot and expiry can be changed the same way, not just the location. Moving between sites isn’t supported — record an outbound at the source site and an inbound at the destination. → Inbound, outbound, move and stocktaking
Cost, gross profit and reports
Q. Can I manage cost and gross profit?
A. Yes. Choose moving-average or standard costing and stock value and gross profit are calculated automatically from your records. Don’t need cost management? “No costing” tracks quantities only. → Costing method
Q. What’s the difference between moving-average and standard costing?
A. Moving average calculates an average cost from your inbound purchase prices and fixes gross profit at the average cost when the outbound completes (later purchases don’t change past figures). Standard costing uses a fixed cost per product, and changing that cost recalculates past reports. → Costing method
Q. Where do I enter purchase and sale prices?
A. Not on the product — as the unit price on each transaction: purchase price on inbound, sale price on outbound. The only price stored on a product is the standard cost used with standard costing.
Q. How is gross profit calculated?
A. Outbound amount (sale unit price × quantity) − the cost of the stock sent out. The cost follows your chosen costing method. → Reading reports
Q. Can I choose any date range for reports?
A. Reports are monthly. Switch months at the top of the screen. Choosing the current month shows totals up to today. → Reading reports
Q. I heard AI can analyse this for me.
A. There’s AI suggestions for paid plans. AI reads the month you selected against the previous month and suggests which products to watch and what to do next. → AI suggestions
Barcodes and scanning
Q. Does it support barcode-based inbound and outbound?
A. Yes. Scan with your phone’s camera to add products to a transaction. Scanning the same product again increases the quantity, so you can just scan item by item. → Scanning barcodes
Q. Can one product have several barcodes?
A. Yes — JAN, ITF, your own codes, all on one product. The same barcode can’t be reused on another product.
Q. What about products with no barcode?
A. Add it on the label print screen and KURAPRO asks “Generate barcode for this item?” — accept and an EAN-13 code is registered on the product, ready to print as a label. → CSV, Excel, label printing and images
Q. Can I find products from a barcode that also carries a shelf number or lot?
A. Yes. Set up a scan pattern and KURAPRO takes only the part you need out of the value that was read, then searches with that (e.g. A01_12345_0001 → 12345). Combine steps such as splitting on a delimiter, stripping a prefix or suffix, and keeping a number of characters — and switch pattern any time from the scan screen. → Scan patterns
Q. Are QR codes supported?
A. Yes, for both scanning and printing. Printing also offers EAN_13(JAN), CODE_128, ITF and others.
Q. Can I print onto off-the-shelf label sheets?
A. Yes. Pick a layout on the label print screen (A4 30-up / 40-up / 70-up, Letter 20-up / 30-up) and KURAPRO lays the PDF out to match that sheet’s cells. Print it at 100% scale with no margins. → CSV, Excel, label printing and images
Stock alerts
Q. Will it tell me when stock runs low?
A. Yes. Set a minimum stock per product and dropping below it flags “shortage.” Note that products with no minimum stock are never flagged, so always set one on things you can’t run out of. → Stock alerts
Q. Can it tell me about overstock too?
A. Yes. Set a maximum stock and exceeding it flags “overstock.” Either threshold alone is fine.
Q. What about expired stock?
A. Stock with an expiry date is flagged “expired” once the date passes, and shown in red in the list. → Stock alerts
Q. Can I be warned before something expires?
A. Set the expiring alert in days per product. Enter 30 and stock within 30 days of expiry is flagged “expiring.” Products without a value are never flagged, so you can apply it selectively. → Stock alerts
Custom fields
Q. Can I add my own fields?
A. Yes — product fields on products and transaction fields on transactions. Colour, size, person in charge, order number, whatever your business needs. → Product fields / Transaction fields
Q. What types are available, and how many?
A. Text, multiline text, number and date (transaction fields also offer barcode). Up to 30 product fields and 30 transaction fields. Text-type fields are also matched by search.
Q. Can a transaction field appear only on certain transactions?
A. Yes. Transaction fields specify which transaction types they apply to, so “Carrier” can appear only on outbound and “Purchase order number” only on inbound. → Adding transaction fields
Migration, CSV, Excel and images
Q. Can I import my existing Excel or other system data?
A. Yes, via bulk import from Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm) and CSV (.csv) for products, clients and transactions. The Excel workbook you use today goes straight in — no conversion to CSV needed (UTF-8 is recommended for CSV). → CSV, Excel, label printing and images
Q. Can I export as an Excel file?
A. Yes. Every list — stock, transactions, clients and reports — offers a CSV download and an Excel download. Excel exports write every cell as text, so a leading 0 on an SKU is never dropped and JAN codes never turn into scientific notation.
Q. Is CSV / Excel import and export a paid feature?
A. No. Importing and exporting both formats is available on the free plan too.
Q. Can I register product images?
A. Yes, from the product’s create or edit screen. They’re shown in the list and on the detail screen. JPEG, PNG and GIF are supported.
Members, roles and sharing
Q. Can several people share the data?
A. Yes. Invite members to the same company and products, stock and transactions are shared in real time. → Members
Q. Can I control what each member can do?
A. There are two roles, administrator and staff. Staff handle daily work — products, stock, transactions and clients — while company settings, member management and billing are administrator-only. → Members
Q. How do I add a member?
A. An administrator enters their name, email address and role on the “Members” screen and sends an invitation. The invitee signs in with the temporary password in the email — not through sign-up.
Devices, accounts and sign-in
Q. Which devices can I use?
A. PC (browser), smartphone and tablet (browser or the iOS / Android apps). Sign in with the same account and you see the same data everywhere. → What you can do with KURAPRO
Q. Can I use a phone and a PC at the same time?
A. Yes — devices of different types work simultaneously. Among devices of the same type only one can stay signed in, so signing in on another one signs the first out.
Q. What if I forget my password?
A. Use “Forgot your password?” on the sign-in screen to email a temporary password to your registered address. Sign in with it and set a new password in account settings. → Signing in and your account
By industry
Q. Can I use it for food and drink?
A. Yes. Turn on Expiry to split stock by best-before date, for first-in-first-out and to avoid waste. Expired and expiring stock appear in stock alerts. → Location, lot and expiry
Q. What about pharmaceuticals and cosmetics?
A. Yes. Combining lot and expiry covers lot-level stock management, use-by dates and traceability.
Q. Is it suitable for manufacturing and materials?
A. Yes. Location and lot management, reorder-point alerts via minimum stock, and cost management all help keep parts and materials at the right level.
Q. Does it work for e-commerce, retail and apparel?
A. Yes. Barcode scanning, centralised management across sites, and custom fields for colour and size are all supported.
Security and data protection
Q. Is my data backed up?
A. Yes. We run on AWS with 24/7 monitoring and automatic backups.
Q. Is communication encrypted?
A. Yes. All communication is encrypted with SSL/TLS (HTTPS). Alongside running on AWS, we apply access controls and regular security audits.
Still stuck?
Get in touch through the in-app inquiry screen, by email (info@biznode.jp) or by phone (+81-50-3551-9637). Error messages and their fixes are listed in Common messages and what to do.