Jewellery ERP software

What it is

ERP stands for enterprise resource planning, which is a phrase from manufacturing and tells a jeweller almost nothing. In a jewellery business the useful definition is narrower: a system where the item record is the single source of truth, and where a sale, a transfer, a karigar job and a valuation are all views of it rather than copies of it. The same software is sold in the United States as jewelry ERP software; the requirement is identical.

The problem in a jewellery shop

Shops rarely fail for want of software. They fail for having three of them. A stock program, a billing program and a spreadsheet for the workshop, each correct on its own terms, produce a business with three answers to every question and a standing argument about which one to believe.

• The same necklace is entered on the purchase, again on the tag, and again on the bill, and at some point one of the three is a digit out.
• Stock says a piece is in the second branch; the second branch says it was sold last week; neither record can show who moved it.
• A customer returns a piece and the original bill is edited to make the figures work, which leaves the VAT register describing a sale that no longer matches the paper the customer is holding.
• The month’s profit is assembled by hand, so it arrives too late to act on and nobody quite trusts it.

How DataJewellers handles it

• One item, one identity. Every piece has an item code that follows your own category pattern and a printed tag carrying it as a CODE 128 barcode. A scan at the counter, on a transfer and inside a stock audit resolves to the same record. See jewellery barcode management.
• Documents that reference, never rewrite. Sales orders, VAT invoices, credit and debit notes, purchase invoices and purchase returns each point at what came before. A correction is a new document, described under jewellery billing software.
• Balances that fall out of the documents. Customer dues and supplier payables are the sum of real invoices and receipts allocated against them, not a figure somebody maintains.
• The workshop inside the same ledger. Metal issued to a karigar is still your stock and is reported as such, through karigar jobs, repairs and replacements.
• Branches and people. Stock transfers recorded on both sides, roles and permissions, custom roles, and an audit log that says who changed what and when.
• Only the modules you use. Karigar jobs come on by default; repairs and replacements are enabled per business, so a shop that does not do them does not see them.

A worked example

One 22K necklace, item code NKL-22-0308, followed through five documents. Its net weight of 24.600 g was typed once, on the day it was received, and its fine weight of 22.550 g was derived from the purity rather than entered at all.

Who it is for

Jewellery businesses that have passed the point where one person can hold the shop in their head: more than one branch, or a workshop that takes metal out, or staff who need to bill and quote without asking the owner. It is also the right question to ask if you are replacing two or three programs that do not speak to each other.

If what you actually need is a faster counter rather than a joined-up business, read jewellery POS software first, and the comparison of the two before you spend anything.