Consignment tracking for coffee roasters
The bag does not spoil, but it ages. How to know what sold and what has sat on the shelf for six weeks with your name on it.
Almost every small roaster enters a new shop on consignment, because nobody buys twenty bags of an origin their customers have not tried. Once the coffee turns over reliably, many shops switch to buying outright.
The sum, in your numbers
- On the shelf last visit
- 18
- Still there today
- 7
- Sold
- 11
- Price per bag
- MX$220
- Owed
- MX$2,420
Coffee does not spoil. That is precisely the problem.
Ageing is invisible
6 weeks
and it looks brand new
A bag roasted six weeks ago is identical on the shelf to one roasted on Tuesday. The shop will not pull it on its own, and the customer who buys it tastes your coffee at its worst and decides that is how your coffee tastes.
So a roaster’s count is not purely an accounting exercise. The real question is not “what am I owed?”, it is “which of these bags has been here too long?”. The first is answered by a subtraction; the second is answered by knowing how many visits that batch has gone without moving — information that only exists if somebody recorded it last time.
Fortnightly, because weekly does not hold
Most small roasters restock every two weeks. It is what the round can sustain when shops are spread across a city and the coffee is in no hurry. The calendar flags the shop at fourteen days, and if you skip it, it stays flagged rather than quietly rolling forward.
From consignment to buying outright
This is the trade where the graduation happens most often: four months on consignment, the shop sees it sell, and starts buying from you outright. The accounting changes completely — you are paid on delivery and count nothing — but it is still the same shop, and the history is not thrown away. You can have both kinds of shop on one round without keeping two notebooks.
Common questions
- How do I know which bags to pull by roast date?
- The count tells you how many are left; the date is on the bag. What changes is that you now know how many visits that batch has sat there, which is the part that was missing.
- What if I pull old bags and leave fresh ones?
- What you pull is recorded as a write-off and what you leave as a delivery. Neither is a sale, so neither raises a charge or a commission.