Jewelry: the intricacies of trade and accounting

Challenges of Accounting and Trading Costume Jewelry

Many costume jewelry traders have already attempted to establish jewelry accounting and organize inventory. Some, for example, introduce their own labeling, assigning alphanumeric codes to items. Others «tie» the price of the item to the article in foreign currency. Still others maintain an inventory database in Excel...
All these methods are good in isolated cases, but they do not cover the entire process of trading and accounting for costume jewelry «from start to finish»: from ordering goods from the supplier to analyzing the trade results of previous periods.

Most entrepreneurs noted that for convenient costume jewelry trading and comprehensive inventory accounting, it is necessary to:

• automatically print price tags for items
• customize the design of price tags
• attach a photo of the product to each item in the inventory database
• track popular items to timely place orders with suppliers
• monitor the availability of items at each retail point and control the movement of goods between several stores.

Torgsoft for Costume Jewelry Stores

1. Detailed Item Classification

To start with, all jewelry is classified into groups (brooches, earrings, sets, rings, necklaces, glasses, etc.). This list can be expanded or shortened as the assortment of your store changes.

It is very convenient that each group of items can be divided into subgroups. For example, in our example, neck jewelry is divided into pendants, necklaces, beads, and collars:

Each piece of jewelry can be assigned a manufacturer, supplier, brand, collection, season. After all, winter jewelry assortment differs from summer, and the 2015 collection from the 2016 collection. There is also «classics» - wedding jewelry, men's accessories, gift packaging, etc. This classification will later allow you to select and analyze items by any of these parameters. It is also useful to supplement the item description with such characteristics as: color, size, material, release date, article.

Here is what the form looks like, where the characteristics of the item are entered (in warehouse accounting terms, it is also called the "item card"):

2. Product Photo, Barcode, and Article

There's nothing to discuss here. Costume jewelry is such a product that is difficult to describe: it either takes too long or is unclear. And some models are very similar to each other. Here, the best item identifiers are the product photo, barcode, and article.

Photo - is uploaded easily. You can either take the photo yourself or use the image from the supplier's catalog. With one click, the photo enlarges to view the product details.

Barcode. You can use the manufacturer's barcode (by scanning it into the database). If the item does not have a barcode or it is not suitable for some reason, the program will generate a barcode and print it on the price tag.

Article. You can create the code yourself, generate it automatically in the program, or use the supplier's (manufacturer's) article - this can be useful for reordering. If articles are not essential to you, simply leave this field empty.

3. Quickly Account for Goods and Prepare Them for Sale

To avoid repeating the same item characteristics each time, you can set up the goods arrival form to only enter one distinctive feature of the item.

This can be called a «conveyor» scheme for receiving goods. For example, we received 5 pairs of earrings that differ only in color. Or 3 identical rings of different sizes - 16, 17.5, and 18. By entering all the repeating item parameters once, we tick the «size» box (in our example), and for the next ring, we only need to enter the size. It looks like this:

4. Automatically Print Price Tags

This is how items look in a store where price tags are manually generated. The price is barely visible, and there is no other information that could help the seller fix the sale of this particular pair of earrings.

Barcode, printed on a special label printer, is easily read by a barcode laser scanner even on a very small price tag.

Costume jewelry sellers often encounter unscrupulous buyers who purchase expensive jewelry for an event and then try to return the item to the store the next day under a «plausible» pretext. In such cases, we recommend placing the tag in a prominent place on the jewelry, making it impossible to wear the item in this condition. And in the sales receipt, be sure to warn that returns are only possible if the tag and receipt are intact.

5. Order Goods from the Supplier

Even at the goods arrival stage, we can mark in the program the minimum quantity of an item at which it is time to place a new order. This form shows how to track items running low (or out of stock) at all our retail points. We select a specific supplier (brand, season, manufacturer) and sort items by the criteria "all items", "zero quantity", "items to order", "ordered items".

After analyzing how much of what is needed, we generate an order file and send it to various suppliers. It is very convenient