Why ledgers and Excel fall short for gold stock
Gold is high-value per piece and moves all day: sold, bought back, exchanged, taken into the cabinet on a redeemable sale, redeemed out again. Every entry touches stock, and once the person writing is not the person selling, the ledger and the cabinet start to disagree within a week.
Excel solves the arithmetic but lets anyone change a number retroactively without a trace, cannot be edited by several people at once, and still forces a full recount at month end, after which nobody can say when the difference appeared.
- Ledger and cabinet disagree, with no way to tell when the drift began
- Bought-back old gold mixed with new gold, so cost and profit come out wrong
- When the owner is away, nobody knows what sold today or what is left
- The month-end count eats a whole night
What a good gold-shop stock system must do
Gold stock differs from ordinary inventory in two ways: it is counted by weight, not just pieces, and each item's cost is tied to the gold price on the day it came in. A system built for gold shops has to carry both on every entry.
- Deducts stock the moment a sale is recorded and adds it on buy-back or exchange, with no re-keying
- Separates new from old gold, and by type and purity, such as 96.5% ornaments and gold bars
- Records pieces and weight together, with cost at the day's price when the item came in
- Supports a count against the cabinet on any day, recording differences for later audit
- Every movement carries who did it and when; nothing changes quietly after the fact
- Shows the gold in the case by type, weight class and purity, from a phone too
Stock has to live in the same system as trading and redeemable sales
A stock program separate from the counter fails in practice, because staff key every entry twice and the second time is the one that gets skipped. The system we designed for Maneelak Gold keeps trading, redeemable sales, gold savings and stock on one set of data: the entry made at the counter is the same entry that moves the stock.
The same system keeps owner and staff permissions apart, puts key entries through an approval step, and locks logins outside shop hours, so the stock figure on screen can be trusted.
Starting a stock system without closing the shop
Start with one opening count entered into the system, which we help prepare and import. Run the system beside the ledger at first, until the numbers agree and staff are confident, then retire the ledger. The shop never closes for a day.
