How to Print Lot & Expiry Labels From Your WMS With BarTender

It’s 6:47 a.m. on a Thursday when the receiving supervisor waves you over.

The pallet in bay three came in with Lot B-4411 on the supplier paperwork. But whoever worked the night shift printed the BarTender labels before the receipt was entered — and typed B-4141.

Two hundred units now carry the wrong lot code. Fourteen are already on pick lists. Two went out on yesterday’s late route. And you have no idea which customer has them until you dig through paper manifests.

That’s what happens when your lot labels and your WMS are separate systems. The label says one thing. The record says another. And the gap stays invisible until a customer calls, an auditor arrives, or a supplier issues a recall.

The Two Ways to Print a Lot Label

Every warehouse running BarTender does one of two things when it’s time to print a lot or expiry label.

Option A: Someone walks to the label printer, opens the BarTender template, and types in the lot code and expiry date from the paperwork in their hand. Print. Done.

Option B: The WMS captures the lot code and expiry date at receiving. The moment that receipt is confirmed, the WMS sends a print trigger to BarTender — lot code, expiry date, quantity, printer — and the label prints automatically. Nobody types anything.

Option A is how most operations work. Option B is how they should.

Here’s the thing. The difference isn’t just efficiency — it’s accuracy. Option A puts a human in the loop, which means typos, transpositions, and labels printed before the receipt exists in the system. Option B pulls from the same data your WMS uses for picking, FEFO enforcement, and traceability. The label and the record are identical by construction.

The 4 Failure Modes of Manual Lot Labeling

If your operation is still on Option A, here are the four ways it breaks — always quietly, always downstream.

The Transposition Error

Lot codes in food, beverage, and pharma operations are often long alphanumeric strings: B-2291, L24071A, MFG-23-0814. The human eye at 6 a.m. sees what it expects to see. A transposition — 4411 becoming 4141 — passes every visual check. It won’t fail until a supplier audit, a customer complaint, or a traceability request, at which point your WMS and your labels disagree and you can’t prove which one is right.

The Template Lag

Most manual BarTender setups rely on a single template that somebody updates when a new lot comes in. When two lots arrive on the same day — or a receiving window spans a shift change — labels from Lot A can still be printing when Lot B is on the dock. Nobody changed the template. The label is wrong. Nobody caught it.

The Unlabeled Batch

In high-volume receiving, labels sometimes don’t get printed in real time. Someone sets a pallet aside to label “in a bit.” Shift ends. The next team assumes it was handled. Now you have lot-controlled inventory sitting in a bin with no chain of custody from dock to shelf.

The Retroactive Lot Assignment

Some operations receive first and assign lot codes afterward — batch-updating the WMS after the physical work is done. Labels printed in that window have no lot code, or the wrong one. When the WMS record is later corrected, there’s no automatic update to labels already applied. The label and the record quietly drift apart.

Watch out: Every one of these failure modes is invisible at the moment it happens. You won’t discover which labels are wrong until you need to trace a specific lot — by which point the stock has moved, been picked, and possibly shipped.

What a Lot and Expiry Label Actually Needs

Before looking at the setup, it helps to know what information a well-formed lot/expiry label should carry. The GS1 standard defines Application Identifiers (AIs) that encode multiple data fields into a single machine-readable barcode.

For most food, beverage, and distribution operations, these are the fields you need:

GS1-128 Application Identifiers for Lot & Expiry Labels

AI (01) — GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)
  → Identifies the product
  → 14-digit number from your product catalog

AI (10) — Lot or Batch Number
  → The exact lot code captured at WMS receiving
  → Variable length, up to 20 alphanumeric characters

AI (17) — Expiry Date
  → Formatted YYMMDD
  → Example: expiry June 30, 2027 encodes as 270630

AI (37) — Count of Trade Items (recommended for case and pallet labels)
  → Number of units in the labeled container

A GS1-128 barcode encoding all four fields gives any downstream scanner — at your customer’s dock, at a retailer’s receiving station, or during an audit — a single, machine-readable source of truth.

Field	Why It Matters	Source in the WMS
GTIN (AI 01)	Product identity — what the item is	Product master
Lot number (AI 10)	Traceability — which batch this unit belongs to	Inbound receipt record
Expiry date (AI 17)	FEFO enforcement and recall scope	Inbound receipt record
Count (AI 37)	Verification — how many units are in this container	Order or receipt quantity

When BarTender pulls these fields directly from your WMS, the label matches your records exactly. When someone types them, the label matches what they typed — which is a different thing.

How the WMS-to-BarTender Data Flow Works

In BarTender Automation, the connection to your WMS runs through BarTender’s Commander utility — a background service that monitors events and fires print jobs when conditions are met.

The flow at receiving looks like this:

1. Capture — your team scans the supplier barcode or enters the lot code and expiry date in the WMS. The system validates the fields and creates the receipt record before any stock moves.
2. Trigger — as part of confirming the receipt, the WMS sends a print command to BarTender. The payload includes the GTIN, lot code, expiry date, quantity, and which printer receives the job.
3. Print — the label prints immediately at the dock printer. The lot code and expiry date on the label are exactly what the WMS recorded — not a retranscription of them.
4. Verify — the team scans the printed label against the open receipt in the WMS to confirm the label matches. Any discrepancy triggers a reprint before the stock moves into a bin.

This is what eliminates the gap between label and record. The label is a direct output of the WMS receipt, not a parallel data entry process running alongside it.

Key insight: The moment lot and expiry capture is required at receiving — not optional, not filled in after the fact — the label data quality problem solves itself. You can’t print a label with wrong data if the WMS won’t let you close the receipt without correct data first.

In Klovio, lot tracking is enabled per product. You turn it on for the items that need it — you don’t force it across your whole catalog. Expiry date capture works the same way, per product. When both are on, every receipt requires a lot code and expiry date before stock can be moved or picked. That data drives the BarTender label. There’s nothing to type.

The Regulatory Context: FSMA and Lot Traceability

If your operation handles high-risk foods — fresh produce, ready-to-eat items, soft cheeses, eggs, nut butters, and others listed under the FDA’s Food Traceability Final Rule — the pressure to have this right goes beyond operational preference.

Under FSMA’s Food Traceability rule, the FDA can require that you produce traceability records within 24 hours of a request. Those records must trace a specific lot from receipt through shipment. “We printed labels but some of them may have been typed incorrectly” is not a compliant answer.

The label and the WMS record need to agree, and the WMS record needs to be the authoritative source — not a best guess at what was on the incoming paperwork.

WMS-driven BarTender printing is what makes that true by default. The label is the WMS record, expressed in a format a scanner can read.

This matters even if your specific products aren’t on the current FDA high-risk list. Distribution, retail, and foodservice customers increasingly require lot traceability as a supplier condition, and the documentation burden falls on whoever is doing the labeling.

For food and beverage distributors specifically, the food-beverage solutions page covers how Klovio handles lot traceability end to end for perishable operations — including expiry date alerts, FEFO enforcement, and recall queries.

Setting It Up: Klovio and BarTender

The Klovio–BarTender integration connects at the receipt level. Here is the setup sequence:

1. Enable lot tracking on products that require it — the lot tracking help article walks through the product-level setting
2. Enable expiry date capture on products with shelf-life requirements — the expiry dates and FEFO guide covers the receiving flow and how expiry drives FEFO picking
3. Install BarTender Automation on a print server on your warehouse network, connected to your dock label printers
4. Configure the Klovio–BarTender connection — the Klovio BarTender page covers the current integration options, what data fields are available for label mapping, and how to request a setup call
5. Map WMS fields to your label template — GTIN to AI (01), lot code to AI (10), expiry date to AI (17), quantity to AI (37)
6. Test with a live receiving event — confirm the label prints with the exact data from the receipt, and scan it back against the receipt to verify they match

Most setups — one dock printer, standard GS1-128 lot/expiry label, single-site operation — configure in an afternoon. Multi-printer or multi-site setups take longer, but the mapping logic is the same at each printer.

For a full comparison of BarTender editions and which one supports WMS-triggered printing (Automation), the BarTender editions guide covers the decision framework, pricing model, and when to move from Cloud to Automation.

What to Do Next

The fastest way to close the gap between your label and your WMS record is to remove the human transcription step entirely.

WMS-driven printing isn’t a complexity upgrade — it’s the elimination of a fragile manual step that exists in most operations purely out of habit. The label should be the record. If it isn’t, you’re managing two parallel systems and hoping they stay in sync.

If you’re running BarTender Automation and want to connect it to Klovio’s lot and expiry capture, the Klovio BarTender page has what you need to get started. Lot labels should match your WMS records. That’s the entire point of the integration.

Everything else is a best guess at 6 a.m.