Jewellery management software

What it is

It is business software shaped around metal rather than around units. A general system can tell you that you sold four items; a jewellery system tells you that you sold 46.120 g net at 22K, took in 15.300 g of old gold at 18K, and still have 120 g out with a karigar. The American spelling, jewelry management software, describes the same work; we write jewellery throughout because that is how the trade writes it here.

The problem in a jewellery shop

Most shops that have outgrown a ledger book do not have one record. They have four, and none of them agrees with the others.

• A stock register, correct on the day it was written and drifting ever since.
• A spreadsheet of customer dues, kept by whoever is best with spreadsheets.
• A till or a bill book that knows the amount and not the weight.
• The owner’s memory, which is the actual index to all three, and which does not open the shop on a day the owner is unwell.

The cost is not only the hour lost to reconciling. It is that nobody below the owner can answer a customer’s question, quote a repair, or say whether a karigar has settled. A customer rings to ask what she paid for a chain two years ago and the answer depends on finding a bill book. A supplier claims an invoice is unpaid and there is no ledger to put against the claim. At the end of the year the accountant asks for a sales register and a VAT summary, and someone spends three evenings building both from a drawer of paper.

How DataJewellers handles it

One item record, entered once, read everywhere. The parts below are areas of the same ledger rather than programs to be reconciled to each other, and that is the difference that matters: a weight corrected on the item is corrected in the valuation, the bill, the transfer and the audit at the same moment.

• Stock. Gross, stone, net and fine weight with purity behind it, across branches and racks, with printed barcode tags and physical stock audits. Jewellery inventory management covers this in detail.
• The counter. Scan a tag, price the piece from today’s rate, take old gold in exchange, split making and wastage from metal value, and carry on billing if the connection drops. See jewellery POS software.
• Buying. Purchases and purchase returns line by line, with supplier balances that agree with the invoices behind them.
• The workshop. Karigar jobs, repairs and replacements, reconciled by weight rather than by trust. See jewellery workshop management.
• People and paper. Customers and their dues, VAT invoices, credit and debit notes, sales orders, and reports exported to CSV, Excel or PDF.
• The business itself. Branches, roles and permissions, custom roles and an audit log of every change, covered under jewellery business management.

A worked example

A day at a single-branch shop, in 22K fine grams. Every line below is a movement the system recorded as a side effect of someone doing their job — billing a customer, issuing metal, receiving a finished piece. Nobody typed a stock figure.

Who it is for

Retail jewellers holding their own stock, typically with two to twenty people, one to five branches, and a workshop or a karigar they work with regularly. It suits a business where more than one person has to be able to answer a customer, and where the owner would like the month’s figures to be a report rather than a weekend. A single-counter shop with a few hundred pieces and no workshop will find a ledger book still serves.

It is also the right starting point if you are not sure which module you need. Read the questions jewellers ask for short answers, or browse the solutions by the part of the shop you are trying to fix. If your business bills in Nepal, the Nepal page covers the fiscal year, VAT invoices, tola and the daily rate.