The Complete Guide to Jewellery Inventory Management

Why jewellery stock is not ordinary retail stock

In most of retail, stock is a count. Forty of one thing arrive, six are sold, thirty-four remain, and the only number anyone needs is thirty-four. A jeweller’s stock does not behave that way, for three reasons that compound.

The first is that two pieces with the same name are not the same stock. Two 22K bangles in one tray might be 18.420 g and 21.310 g. Selling “a bangle” tells you nothing; selling 21.310 g gross with 1.150 g of stone tells you everything. The second is that the value of what you hold changes while you sleep. Nothing moved in the tray, but the metal rate moved, so any record that stores a price rather than a weight and a purity is out of date by the time the shutter opens. The third is that a piece can leave the premises without being sold: issued to a karigar, sent to another branch, taken in as a customer repair. Ordinary stock software has nowhere to put metal that is yours but not here.

All three point the same way. The unit of account has to be weight, and the weight has to carry its purity with it.

The four weights every piece needs

Almost every argument about jewellery stock records comes from holding fewer than four weights. Hold all four, on every piece, and most of the arguments stop.

• Gross weight — everything on the scale: metal, stones, beads, thread, enamel. It is the only weight you can verify by picking the piece up, which is why the audit uses it.
• Stone weight — what is not metal. A field of its own, never a note in a remarks box, because it is subtracted in every price calculation the piece will ever be part of.
• Net weight — gross minus stone. The metal you actually own.
• Fine weight — net multiplied by the fineness of its purity. At 22K the fineness is 22 ÷ 24, or 0.91667; at 18K it is 0.75. Fine weight is the only figure on which two pieces of different purity can be added together, which makes it the figure every reconciliation runs on.

Record weights in gram to three decimal places, whatever unit your counter speaks in. Tola is a display choice, not a storage choice: at 1 tola = 11.6638 g, rounding to two decimals in tola throws away about half a milligram of gold per piece, and across a few thousand pieces that is a discrepancy nobody can explain later.

Decide your categories before you enter a single piece

Categories are the one structural decision that is genuinely painful to change once a few thousand items exist, so it is worth an afternoon at the start. Two rules cover most of it.

First, categories should mirror how the people at your counter already speak: chain, tilhari, bangle, ring, pote, sirbandi, earring, kalli. If a member of staff has to translate a customer’s word into a different one before they can search, the list is wrong. Second, a category should hold exactly one idea. “Gents ring 22K light” is three fields pretending to be one, and folding purity into the category leaves you unable to value your 22K holding across all categories — the report you will want most. Purity is a field on the piece: one tray can hold 24K coins, 22K bangles and 18K stone-set pieces, and a customer bringing old gold will hand you a purity none of you chose. Hallmarking lets you trust that figure, but somebody still has to enter it.

Item codes a person can read aloud

Every piece needs one identifier short enough to read down a telephone and structured enough to recognise. Category, purity and serial does almost everything asked of it:RNG-22-0873 is the eight hundred and seventy-third 22K ring, and a member of staff can tell from the code alone which tray it belongs in. That code is the piece’s name everywhere — tag, bill, transfer note, audit — and it should never be reused after the piece is sold.

Opening stock: the day you begin

The first day is the hard one, for a physical reason rather than a technical one: every piece has to go on a scale once. Three things make it survivable. Begin at a month or fiscal-year boundary — the Nepali fiscal year runs Shrawan to Ashadh, so a Shrawan start means your first full-year report is a full year. Weigh into a spreadsheet first, one row per piece, so a second person can correct it before anything is committed. And enter the result as opening stock in one import rather than as a hundred small purchases.

Counting stock without closing the shop

The instinct is to shut for a day and count everything. It is not necessary and it is not even better. Count by section: one tray, one category or one rack at a time, closed off before the next is opened. A section of two or three hundred pieces can be counted between customers, and a shop that counts four sections a week has counted everything in a quarter without ever locking its door.

What matters is that the count is a comparison, not a list. Read each piece’s code — scanned from its tag, if it has one — and let the system tell you what it expected in that section. Then the output is not “we found 309 pieces” but “three pieces the register places in this tray were not in it”, which is a question somebody can actually answer.

The monthly reconciliation

Once a month, prove the stock rather than trusting it. Every movement in and out of the business is expressed in fine weight, added up, and compared against a physical count. The figures below are invented; the shape is what to copy.

What to check every month

• How much metal is still out with karigars, by karigar, in fine weight.
• Whether any customer repair is sitting in saleable stock. It is not yours to sell, and it inflates your holding.
• Pieces with no tag printed, which are the pieces that will be missed in every count.
• Items whose net weight equals their gross weight but which visibly have stones.
• Transfers between branches that were recorded at one end and not the other.
• The variance trend for each section, against the last three counts.

How DataJewellers does this

The item record is built around the four weights and purity rather than having them added as custom fields, so the arithmetic above is what it already does. See jewellery inventory management software for how items, branches, locations and stock audits fit together, and jewellery barcode management for tags carrying the item code as a CODE 128 barcode, so a section count is a scan rather than a transcription. Metal still out with the workshop is tracked in jewellery workshop management, by weight and by karigar. Opening stock can be imported from the spreadsheet you weighed into, and daily metal rates are fetched from FENEGOSIDA with a manual override when your own buying rate differs.