iPad Looking for a good app to manage inventory and sales

[convergent]

My wife is starting a business to sell items through a booth in an antique mall. The way these places work is that you stock your booth and put tags on each item with a unique number, description, and price... and the mall operator takes care or sales, sales tax, overhead, etc.. They get a monthly rent fee, plus 10% of sales.

My wife's main computer is an iPad Air. I thought about setting up a spreadsheet for her, but then started looking for an app to do this. There are many inventory apps that don't allow tracking sales. The best one I've found is "Inventory Now" from iPartyMobile. Its not all that intuitive, but seems to do the basics. There is another one, "Inventory Scanner 2015" that I like as well for its flexibility and ease of use, but it doesn't have any sales tracking in it that I can find.

Does anyone have a recommendation for app that lets you inventory and track sales on "unique items"? Many of these systems are for tracking items that you sell over and over and keep a minimum inventory level... that isn't what we are needing.

Thanks.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Because each of her items is unique and she's not actually processing the sale a regular point-of-sale app is probably overkill and otherwise may not be any good to her at all.

Is she going to be gathering customer info, such as names and email addresses, for potential future marketing?

 

[convergent]

Because each of her items is unique and she's not actually processing the sale a regular point-of-sale app is probably overkill and otherwise may not be any good to her at all.

Is she going to be gathering customer info, such as names and email addresses, for potential future marketing?

No. She will have no info on the customers from the mall. They will give her a statement from the mall once a month indicating all the items that were sold with one bulk payment. POS would be unused, as would customer tracking. She simply needs an easy way to keep track of what items she has on hand, what they cost, and eventually when and what they sold for. It would also be handy to have multiple stock locations because she has a lot more items than are in the store... many are in storage. The mall does have some built in discount models, so selling price will need to be adjusted when she gets that statement. She'll need to go through the statement, find each item, adjust the selling price, and mark it sold. For most items, she'll never have another of that item once its sold.

The one thing I would like her to be able to do, but will probably need to do manually via an export spreadsheet, is to automatically produce labels and/or a new stock sheet. When she adds new items, she needs to give to the store a list with the stock number, description, and selling price. My thought if we go with Inventory Now, is to let it sync a CSV file to dropbox (standard feature), and then pull that into excel and manually create a list to give them. Otherwise, she'll have to double enter everything. For a couple of items it would be easier to just do it manually, but as she's just getting setup she added 100 items yesterday and had to do it all by hand.

 

[convergent]

One other thought... seems that this might be an untapped market. There are tons of these Antique Malls all over the US. Talking to owners at two of them, it seems that many of the booth renters don't keep their own records... they just depend on the mall being honest and keeping track of everything via their monthly statements. So they have no idea what items they are making money on and which they are not... and no idea how long its taking for items to be sold.

 

[BrianBaughn]

What is the connectivity situation for that iPad Air? Is it wifi only? Is there wifi at the mall? Does she have an iPhone or Android phone?

 

[convergent]

Here iPad Air is cellular and she also has an iPhone.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Here iPad Air is cellular and she also has an iPhone.

Great! Then what you need is a customizable database that is web accessible, iOS compatible and can generate custom reports. I haven't thought a lot about the label creation aspect.

Take a look a Zoho Creator at zoho.com. I'm pretty sure you can sign up for a free account and test it out via web interface and iOS apps. It's not too expensive for what it can do.

If not that then maybe something similar.

 

[convergent]

Great! Then what you need is a customizable database that is web accessible, iOS compatible and can generate custom reports. I haven't thought a lot about the label creation aspect.

Take a look a Zoho Creator at zoho.com. I'm pretty sure you can sign up for a free account and test it out via web interface and iOS apps. It's not too expensive for what it can do.

If not that then maybe something similar.

Thanks for the suggestion, but that looks a little more "roll your own". While I'd have fun trying to build what I want there, I don't have the time to invest now and really looking for a more "out of the box" solution. There are some nuances to this that make it a bit more complex than just having a spreadsheet type thing. My wife is also very anti-techie, so won't have any patience for things that aren't intuitive.

The more I've looked at this, the more I'm leaning towards Inventory Now. It is pretty cheap and does all the critical stuff needed. With the dropbox option, I should be able to then do anything else I need via excel.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

 

[cdcastillo]

My wife is starting a business to sell items through a booth in an antique mall. The way these places work is that you stock your booth and put tags on each item with a unique number, description, and price... and the mall operator takes care or sales, sales tax, overhead, etc.. They get a monthly rent fee, plus 10% of sales.

My wife's main computer is an iPad Air. I thought about setting up a spreadsheet for her, but then started looking for an app to do this. There are many inventory apps that don't allow tracking sales. The best one I've found is "Inventory Now" from iPartyMobile. Its not all that intuitive, but seems to do the basics. There is another one, "Inventory Scanner 2015" that I like as well for its flexibility and ease of use, but it doesn't have any sales tracking in it that I can find.

Does anyone have a recommendation for app that lets you inventory and track sales on "unique items"? Many of these systems are for tracking items that you sell over and over and keep a minimum inventory level... that isn't what we are needing.

Thanks.

Try iZettle, they let you keep inventory and record "cash sales", which I imagine is useful for what you seek. I use it but mostly to charge credit/debit cards in my office.

 

[rebecca0670]

On your post looking for help with her small business, did you ever find something that worked for her?

 

[esskay]

Would this app meet your needs?
https://www.sortly.com/

I got it quite some time ago and use it to inventory items at home; have never tried their business-focused Pro service.