Lotion and retail inventory that moves with every sale

Retail is easy to lose track of

Lotion, eyewear and after-care are small tickets that add up. They are also the first thing to slip on a busy afternoon. A bottle goes out the door on the wrong line, the shelf drifts away from the count, and nobody can say which lotion earns its space until it is time to reorder.

TanVision puts retail on the same ticket as tanning. The desk can sell a lotion with a package at the till, or add one to a walk-in or upgrade charge at check-in, and the stock count moves with the sale either way.

What each product carries

• Name, SKU, price and cost.
• A stock count and a reorder level. An item you do not count can skip the count.
• Its own sales tax setting: a named tax category, a rate of its own, the salon's rate, or not taxable.
• A Gift card tick box: selling a ticked item issues a gift certificate for its value.

Price, cost, stock, reorder level and tax can all be edited straight in the Inventory list, and the list can be filtered by name or SKU. Cost is kept from the front desk: owners and managers see it, and so does anyone you give the job of changing prices or counting stock. It is what the margin figures in reports are worked out from.

Retail products never carry the tanning excise. That rate sits on tanning packages and memberships only, so a bottle of lotion cannot pick it up by mistake. More on how the two taxes are kept apart is on the tax and excise page.

Stock that moves with the sale

• Each sale takes its quantity off the count in the same database transaction that records the sale, so a sale is never recorded without its stock moving.
• A void puts the stock back.
• At or below its reorder level, an item's count turns amber in Inventory, and its tile on the till shows how many are left.
• At zero, the count turns red, and the till tile reads Out of stock and cannot be added to a ticket.

Four figures sit above the list: how many products you sell, how many are low, how many are out, and what the stock on hand is worth at cost. Stock value is counted at what you paid rather than at the shelf price, because that is the money you have tied up in it.

TanVision does not place orders with your supplier. It tells you what is low and what is gone; the order is yours to place.

See what earns its shelf space

• Best and worst sellers ranks every product and package by revenue, units and margin, and shows the tail that is not moving.
• Tanning against retail splits service revenue from product revenue, month by month.
• The reports dashboard lists top products for any date range, and the printable day sheet shows every ticket line by line.

Every one of these reads from the same sale lines the till wrote, so the product ranking and the day sheet describe the same sales. See the full list on the reports page.

Pay the desk for selling lotion

Commission in TanVision has a separate retail rate and tanning rate for each person, because a bottle of lotion and a tanning package carry different margins. Commission is worked out on the price before tax. The commission board shows the team's standing for this month and the two before, and managers see every rate and figure.

Sales, member prices and the online shop

Run a sale on retail with start and end dates. The till strikes the regular price through, prints the sale by name, and the price goes back on its own when the sale ends. A membership can also give its holders a percentage off retail. Discounts do not stack: the best single discount wins.

Products can also appear on your salon's online shop page. An order the client will pay for at the desk is a request that the desk rings up at the till, so stock moves only when the sale is actually made. Where your shop takes payment at checkout, a product paid online is sold then, can be paid for only while enough are in stock, and is handed over at the desk.

Packages that arrived as retail

A problem that can follow a move from other software: tanning packages come across typed as retail products. They ring up for the right money and put nothing on the client's account, so the client turns up to use a visit that was never recorded.

TanVision flags these in Inventory. Make package turns one into a real package in place, keeps its price, and retires the old product so past receipts still name it. Convert all does the whole list at once, reading the visit count from the name, so Buy 3 Visits Get 1 FREE becomes four visits. Anything it cannot read confidently is left as retail rather than guessed at, and gift cards are never converted. More on moving over is on the switching page.

Retire rather than delete

Take a product off sale by retiring it. It disappears from the till, and every past sale that names it still reads correctly. Delete is for an item that should never have existed, and it is refused the moment anything points at it.

Related features

Retail sits on the same till as tax and excise, gift certificates and the rest of the tanning salon POS, and every figure lands in reports. To walk through Inventory with your own lotion list, book a demo.