Using a phone as the barcode scanner for your stock

The phone caught up

For years, barcode stock control meant a handheld terminal: a chunky device with a laser, a cradle, a licence and a price that only added up in a warehouse. Small shops looked at the quote and went back to a notebook.

That gap closed. A modern phone camera reads a printed barcode in a fraction of a second, in poor light, held at an angle, off a curved bottle. The scanner is no longer the expensive part, and in a shop with a few hundred lines there is nothing a terminal does that the phone in your hand does not.

What to do about lines with no barcode

Every shop has them: loose goods, things you make yourself, boxes whose label has rubbed off, and old stock that predates barcodes entirely. This is where most people give up on scanning, and it is a solved problem.

You print your own. A barcode is only a number drawn in bars, and in retail the numbers starting with 2 are set aside for a shop's own use. They never clash with a manufacturer's code, because no manufacturer is issued one. You generate a number for the product, print it on a label, stick it on the shelf edge or the item, and from then on it scans like anything else.

Do it once, in a batch, for everything without a code. An afternoon and a sheet of labels is what turns scanning from a party trick into how the shop actually runs.

Where scanning saves time, and where it does not

It pays off wherever you handle the same product over and over with your hands full. Goods in is the clearest case: scan each box as it comes off the pallet and the quantities are entered before the driver leaves. A stocktake is the second: scanning each unit as you touch it beats holding a number in your head while you look for the right row.

It saves nothing when you are adding a product for the first time. Scanning tells the app which product you mean, not what it is called or what it costs, so a new line still needs typing. Anyone promising that a scan fills in the name and price is promising a product database, which is a different feature with different gaps.

What to check before you rely on it

Three questions separate an app where scanning is real from one where it is a demo feature.

• Does a scan change stock, or only search? Searching is a lookup. The time is saved when the scan itself is the entry.
• Can you scan continuously, one unit after another, without closing and reopening the camera between each one?
• Does it scan with no signal? The camera is on the device, but plenty of apps still need the server to identify the code.

Doing it in Invenva

Scanning in Invenva is the entry, not a search. Point the camera at a product and a small card appears with the item and a number you can step or type, so one hand can take in a whole delivery. Scan the same product again and the count keeps adding, which is how a real pallet gets counted.

The same camera runs the stocktake, where each scan is one physical unit in your hand, and it runs the checklists for deliveries and outgoing orders, where the running tally is shown against what was expected.

For lines with no barcode, Invenva generates a shop's own code starting with 2, checks it against every code you already have and saves it to the product. With Pro it also prints the code on a label sheet with the name and, if you want, the price. From that moment the product scans like a branded one.

All of it works with no signal, because the reading happens on the device and the stock change is written locally.

The demo is a sample inventory that needs no account. The phone camera scans in the iPhone and Android apps and in the web app, and a USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner works in all three.