DHES

Alright, so I know my situation is not unique in any way, shape or form. My friend just opened a business near the end of last year, and has lots of different stock. He was using an old cash register, and not keeping track of inventory, sales, etc. So out of the kindness of my heart I fixed up an old laptop I have and bought a barcode scanner. He has the packing slips for all the merchandise in his store, but obvious the quantities are going to be off.

Any suggestions on how I should even attempt to tackle this task? Entering all of his stock in, and pretty much going from scratch?

ProDeZigner,

I am assuming that you are only asking abut setting up the stock table and that you have already set up the printer, header, footer, cash drwer, payment methods, etc.

Since they are referenced in the stock table you must first set up the tax rates, and if you are using them the category list and vendor list.

You can use the packing lists to start entering the descriptions for the merchandise. However you can only use the stock numbers on the packing lists if they are also the numbers needed to ring up the items into a sale. For example if the numbers are UPC codes or you will be using the "vendor stock numbers" to ring up the items.

Once the above is done you wil need your friend to fill in the prices, and the category, and vendor pointers for each item since i assume that you will not know this.

Now it is time to take an inventory of the store and enter that.

That should pretty much do it.

Dale

Everything is setup, and I figured doing an inventory would be the best way, but to where the UPCs aren't on the invoices, it's going to make them hard to put in to the stock table. As far as I know I can't leave the Stock Number blank and just go in and scan the UPCs one at a time (since the scanner sends the return after scanning) after entering the rest of the information.

Also, I've seen lots of invoices with letters in the invoice number (?), would the best route be to just skip the letters or could you possibly add it as a new feature?

ProDeZigner,

You can use the "Vendor stock number" to ring up merchandise into a sale. The "Vendor stock number" can have any character in it and can be up to 40 characters long. However each product will still need a regular stock number. Read this http://keyhut.com/postip6b.htm#vendor.

However if you use the "Vendor stock number" you will not be able to use a barcode scanner to rung items into a sale. For that you would have to use the UPC code for that item as the regular stock number.

Dale

Dale, You can just call me Brandon.

So, when inputting the items into the stock table I can technically "bypass" the Stock Number initially and just use Vendor Stock Number? Then after all the items get entered in, scan the actual barcode and go down the line, then do an inventory of everything in the store to get accurate counts?

Yep