Jewellery inventory management software

What it is

A jewellery inventory system is a stock ledger whose unit of account is weight, not quantity. Each item carries a gross weight, the weight of any stones, a net metal weight and a fine weight derived from its purity, and the software keeps all four correct as the piece moves through the business. Searches for jewelry inventory software and jewellery inventory software mean the same thing; we use the British spelling throughout because that is how the trade writes it here.

The problem in a jewellery shop

General retail software counts things. A jeweller does not sell things, they sell metal with labour on top of it, and two rings in the same tray with the same item name are not interchangeable stock: one is 9.420 g at 22K and the other is 9.780 g at 22K, and the difference is real money. The moment stock is counted in pieces, three problems follow.

• Nobody can reconcile the safe. Twelve chains is not a figure you can check against a scale; 138.640 g of 22K is.
• Valuation drifts. If the record holds a price rather than a weight and a purity, it silently goes stale the next time the market moves.
• Metal in the workshop disappears from view. A karigar holding 45 g of issued metal is still holding your stock, and a piece-count register has nowhere to put it.

How DataJewellers handles it

The item record is built around weight and purity from the start. Gross, stone, net and fine weight sit on the piece, with the purity behind the fine weight, so gold at 24K, 22K, 21K and 18K can share a category without sharing a rate. Weights are held in gram and can be read in tola where that is how your counter speaks. Silver runs on its own rate.

• Item codes you can read. Codes follow your own category pattern, so a tilhari reads as a tilhari rather than as SKU-4471, and a printed tag carries that code as a CODE 128 barcode. See jewellery barcode management for how tags and scanning work.
• A place, not just a count. Branches, locations and racks, with stock transfers between branches recorded on both sides so nothing is in two places or in none.
• Physical stock audits. Count, compare against the register, review the differences and close the audit — with the result kept, so next quarter you can see whether the same tray is still drifting.
• Daily metal rates. Rates are fetched daily from FENEGOSIDA, and you can override them by hand when your own buying rate differs.
• Valuation two ways. What the stock cost, and what it is worth at this morning’s rate.
• A beginning. Opening stock for the day you start, imported from a spreadsheet rather than typed in twice.

A worked example

Say a tray holds four 22K bangles. The register shows their weights individually, and the fine weight is what the valuation and the reconciliation both run on. At 22K the fineness is 22 ÷ 24, or 0.91667.

Who it is for

Shops holding gold and silver stock they can no longer reconcile by memory: a single counter with two or three thousand pieces, a family business with a second branch, a shop whose workshop takes metal out and brings pieces back. If your stock is small enough to count in an afternoon and never leaves the premises, a ledger book still works. Once there is a second branch, or a karigar, it does not.