Consignment tracking for preserves makers
Nothing spoils, so nothing forces you back. The risk with preserves is forgetting a shop for six months, not losing stock.
Consignment is close to compulsory in preserves: no small shop buys two dozen jars outright of a flavour nobody has tasted. The unusual flavours go on consignment even when the classics are already bought outright.
The sum, in your numbers
- On the shelf last visit
- 36
- Still there today
- 14
- Sold
- 22
- Price per jar
- MX$95
- Owed
- MX$2,090
Preserves are the case where nothing forces you to do this properly, which is exactly why almost nobody does.
What does not expire gets forgotten
A cheesemaker visits weekly or loses product. A baker, every three days. You can leave thirty-six jars in a shop and not come back for half a year without a single one spoiling.
And that is the leak: it is not spoilage, it is memory. Six months on you arrive, there are fourteen jars, and nobody has any idea whether you left thirty-six or forty-eight. The shop is not lying to you either — they genuinely do not remember. You settle on whatever you both believe, which is almost always less.
The subtraction that ends the argument
22 jars
sold, at 95 pesos each
Thirty-six left, fourteen still there. The table above already ran it; the number only exists because somebody wrote down the thirty-six.
There is nothing sophisticated about that sum. The hard part was never the arithmetic, it was having the thirty-six written down somewhere you still have six months later.
Broken jars and flavours that do not move
6 months
and not one jar spoiled
Which is exactly the problem. Nothing forces the visit, so the visit does not happen, and the count that was true in March is a guess by September.
Two things specific to this trade sit badly in a spreadsheet. The first is breakage: a broken jar is neither a sale nor stock, it is a third thing. The second is the flavour that does not move — the shop sold twelve strawberry and two of the unusual one, and unless you track it per product, next visit you leave the same quantity of both again.
Common questions
- How often is worth visiting if the product lasts a year?
- Monthly is common, and not because of the product but because of the account. Leave it six months and what sold in March is billed in September, by which point neither of you remembers what was there.
- How do I record a jar that broke in the shop?
- As a write-off. It leaves stock, does not count as a sale and raises no commission. Who absorbs the loss is your agreement with the shop, not something the app decides.