Running stock in a retail store without a back office

A shop is not a small warehouse

Warehouse software assumes a receiving door, a picking route and somebody whose whole job is stock. A store has none of those. Goods arrive between customers, they go straight onto the shelf, and the person booking them in is the same person at the register two minutes later. Any system that needs a quiet hour to be used correctly will not be used at all.

The other difference is shape. A warehouse tends to hold fewer lines in larger quantities. A store holds hundreds of lines in ones and twos, most of them cheap, a few of them the reason the month works. Software built for pallets makes you enter each of those the same way, which is why so many shops quietly go back to a notebook.

Three numbers decide whether a store makes money

Not the total value of the stock, which changes every day and tells you nothing on its own. What moves money is smaller and more specific.

• What is missing. The gap between what the records say and what is on the shelf: breakage, a delivery short, something used in the shop, something taken. You cannot fix it until you can see it, and you can only see it by counting.
• What is not moving. Money already spent, sitting on a shelf, earning nothing. Every store has more of it than the owner thinks, and it is invisible until something lists what has not sold in ninety days.
• What ran out. The sale you never made and will never know about. The customer asked, it was not there, they bought it somewhere else and did not mention it.

Counting a shop that never closes

The full count, everything in one go with the doors shut, is the version everybody knows and almost nobody does more than once a year. It is worth doing, but a year is a long time to be wrong.

The version that survives contact with a real shop is smaller: one shelf, one category, one supplier at a time, on a slow morning, and a different section each week. Nothing closes, nobody stays late, and inside a couple of months the whole shop has been counted anyway. What matters is writing the reason on the spot when a line does not match, while the damaged box is still in your hand.

What to look for before you pay for one

Most of the differences between systems do not matter to a shop. These four do.

• It has to work with the phone in your pocket. A store has no spare terminal, and the camera on a phone reads barcodes as well as a handheld scanner does.
• It has to work when the internet does not. Storerooms have thick walls, and a system that stops at the moment goods arrive gets abandoned in the first month.
• A second person has to be able to use it without being able to break it. Booking a delivery in is not the same permission as changing what things cost.
• It has to tell you rather than wait to be asked. Nobody opens a reporting screen in the middle of a shift, so the low stock and the expiry date have to arrive on their own.

Doing it in Invenva

Products are added by scanning the barcode already printed on them, and everything after that is one number: this many in, this many out. Each entry keeps who did it, when, and the customer or supplier if there was one, so a number that looks wrong can be explained instead of argued about.

Counting is a screen you walk the shelves with, one line per product, a tick as you go and a reason where the count does not match. You can scope it to one shelf or one category, so the weekly version of a count is a normal thing to do rather than an event.

Everything keeps working with no signal and syncs when there is one, stock changes are saved as changes rather than as new totals so two people cannot overwrite each other, and an employee can be given stock in and stock out without being given prices or the ability to delete a product.

The demo is a stocked shop with history in it and needs no account.