You could program a key at bottom with the ON SCREEN KEYBOARD function using the TOUCH SCREEN SETUP. This will let you manually type in the item number or bar code number. One thing to note, if you do not use bar code numbers as your item numbers, you can still make this work. On your inventory screen, click on the green check box beside ALTERNATE SKU. Then type or scan the bar code and ENTER and SAVE. You now have both an item # and bar code # that will reference your items.