How to Track Stock and Manage Sales Efficiently if You Print on T-shirts, Bags, Cushions and Similar Products

If you run a shop printing various designs on t-shirts, mugs, cushions and the like, you face several challenges:

• You need to know your exact stock of the blank items you print on at any moment. That is, exactly how many t-shirts, cushions, mugs and so on you have.
• Since you probably have a large number of different images you print, it helps to see which designs sell well and which do not.
• Every so often someone will turn up and offer you a new design to try, which then has to be brought into the whole process, with analysis afterwards to see whether it pays.
• When you sell the finished item — and every product consists of the blank you print on plus the design you print — you need to take the base item, such as a mug or a t-shirt, off stock and record the design that was printed. Ideally all of that would happen by entering a single item code.

One way to do this would be simply to record at the point of sale that you sold, say, one mug and one "Good morning" print. Over time, though, this leaves you unable to tell which design goes well with which item, because all you have is a list of items and a list of designs sold — so at the end of the day you know you sold 3 mugs, 5 t-shirts and 4 cushions, along with 2 "Good morning" designs, 3 designs with a camel cartoon and 7 designs with a motorbike.

It would be far better to know at any moment exactly which combination of item and design you sold, while also having an accurate view of your stock. That is, to know at any moment that you sold 3 mugs with "Good morning" on them and 2 t-shirts with the camel cartoon, and that 3 mugs and 2 t-shirts need to come off stock.

Below is the most efficient way to solve all of the above and manage your stock and sales properly:

#1. Define a recipe for every type of finished product

Define every finished product you can make, in the sense of listing what it consists of. For example: the product "mug with Good morning" consists of 1 mug and 1 "Good morning" design. So you need to build a list of every possible combination you can sell as a finished product. Excel is probably the easiest place to do this. What you are creating are recipes, which you can then use to manage stock — taking the individual items you sell off stock and tracking which designs do well and which do not.

#2. Record only the finished product at the point of sale

When a customer comes in and buys one of your products, record only the finished product — that is, record that a mug with the "Good morning" design was sold. Working this way at the point of sale gives you:

• Faster service, because you only enter the finished product
• Analysis of which finished product performs with which design

#3. Use the recipes you defined to manage stock

The recipes you defined earlier mean you know exactly what to take off stock once a sale goes through. Beyond that, you can see which designs do better and which worse, and of course what your item stock is, so you can plan your buying. All of this is very simple to do in TiramisuERP, with the added feature that the items defined in the recipe come off stock automatically when the finished item is rung up on the POS. If you enter a finished product called "mug with Good morning" on the POS, TiramisuERP will automatically take a mug off stock once the sale goes through and record that the "Good morning" design service was performed.

The steps would be as follows:

• Enter every blank you print on into the reference data as items
• Enter every design into the reference data as services
• Enter every finished item that combines a blank and a design into the reference data
• Define all the recipes — that is, enter every possible combination of item and design that you sell
• Enable automatic assembly on every sale, which will take the item making up the finished product off stock — a mug, for instance — and record the service sold with it, such as the "Good morning" design.

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