🏪 Store Manager

What we are working on

The shop talking to itself: the new website, the shelving in the back, the van. Start one for a job, argue it out, send a photo of what you mean — then write down what was decided, so the answer is still here in six weeks. See them all.

Discussion

Working out what to do, before anybody is told to do it. One discussion per job — the new website, the shelving, the van — with everything anybody said about it in one place, under their name. When it is decided, settle it with a sentence saying what was decided: that sentence is what the list shows afterwards, and it is the thing a chat group can never tell you. What comes out of it goes to somebody as a task.

1 Upload a sheet

Order lists

Drafts of what the shop needs to order — one for each supplier, each run to the wholesaler or each job, named however suits. Add things as you notice them running short. A list is only a draft: it orders nothing, moves no stock and spends no money.

Supplier catalogues

The suppliers’ own price lists, as they send them. Upload one, check what was read off it, publish it — then search it and put what the shop needs into that supplier’s basket, which becomes their purchase order.

Preorders

Drafts for what customers have ordered ahead — goods the shop is getting in for them. New preorder opens a cart marked as a preorder: add what the customer wants, name the customer, and Save as draft parks it here. Open one in the cart to change it, and ring it up from there when the goods arrive. Each is a Shopify draft tagged Preorder, so it is also under Drafts.

Reserved

Goods held for a customer until a set date — taken off sale so nobody else buys them in the meantime. New reservation opens a cart marked to reserve: add the items, name the customer, choose the date to hold them until, and Save as draft parks it here. When the date passes Shopify puts the stock back on sale by itself and the row says expired. Open one in the cart to ring it up when the customer comes, Extend to hold it longer, or Release to let the goods go. Each is a Shopify draft tagged Reserved, so it is also under Drafts.

Purchase orders

Write an order yourself or upload the supplier's sheet, then receive it into stock when the delivery arrives.

Orders

Newest first until a heading says otherwise. New orders appear automatically while this page is open.

Drafts

Carts parked for later — a held sale, a quote, or an invoice waiting to be paid. These are Shopify draft orders, so they also appear under Orders → Drafts in your admin.

Top Speed Orders

The orders to go out with Top Speed, ticked at the till or on the Orders page — the list to hand over when the driver comes. Newest first; untick one at the end of its row and it leaves, and the order itself is untouched. Tick the boxes at the front of the unpaid ones and Settle together collects for the lot of them at once. Once the courier's waybill number is known, Add tracking under an order's fulfillment puts it on the order in Shopify. Booking a parcel — the waybill, the money to collect at the door, the sheet that travels with it — is still Delivery.

Quotes

Every quote number this shop has printed, newest first — what it was for, who asked, and for how much. The search combs the whole book and the pages at the foot walk back through the rest of it, not just the quotes shown here. When a customer says yes, the quote becomes an official invoice from here: the goods are billed as they stand, without rebuilding the cart.

Proforma invoices

Invoices printed on company paper without a number — newest first, with a search that combs the whole book and pages at the foot that walk back through it. Nothing here has touched the official sequence: when the customer pays, or their accounts department asks for the real thing, the proforma becomes an official invoice from this page without rebuilding the cart.

Official invoices

Every MOF invoice number this shop has issued, newest first — what it was for, who it was made out to, and for how much. Press an invoice to see the items on it, from the copy the book kept when the paper printed. The pages at the foot walk back through the rest of the book, not just the invoices shown here. Numbers are spent only when an invoice really prints.

Receipts

Every payment the book has recorded, newest first — what came in, against which invoice, whether paper was printed for it and whether the money has been counted into the cash drawer. Printing a receipt moves no money: the sheet lands here as paper waiting on a payment, and pressing Paid on it — or on the invoice’s row in the invoice book — asks what came in, in dollars, lira or both, and writes the receipt and the drawer entry together. A sheet nobody ever pays is torn up from its own row. Each row can be put back on paper exactly as it printed, and a payment the book has under the wrong date can be moved onto the day the money really came in. The figure above the table is what those invoices still owe, with what came in split beside it by whether paper exists and by what the till is still waiting for — all of it over everything the filters matched, not just the rows on screen.

Vouchers

Gift vouchers the shop has sold or given away, and what is left on each. A voucher that is sold is a sale into the drawer the day it is sold; spent at the till, it comes off the goods as a discount named for it, so the money is counted once. One that is given never had money behind it. Take one off a sale from New sale — 🎟️ Voucher, beside the discount.

Sponsorships

Goods the shop gives away to be seen — parts for a school's robotics team, prizes for a fair, a kit handed to somebody who will film it. Given from here they go out on an order like any sale, so the stock comes off the shelf, but nothing is collected: what they are worth, at the prices below, is filed as a Marketing cost — on the Expenses page and in the P&L. No money moves: not out of the drawer, and not out of any account.

Invoice customers

The customers official invoices and quotes are made out to — company name, MOF #, telephone and address, held once so the Print dialog fills them in instead of asking each time. Whatever gets typed when paper prints is saved back here by itself.

Statement of account

Pick a customer from the file and every official invoice made out to them lines up against the payments received, oldest first, down to what is still owed. Bound it to a period and everything earlier is carried in as a balance brought forward.

Cash drawer

Every dollar and every lira that went into the drawer or came out of it — sales as they were paid, money paid in and out, what it costs to be open, and the corrections that keep the till agreeing with the book.

Accounts

Every pocket the shop holds money in besides the drawer — the bank, the Whish wallet, the safe — each with its two-currency balance, the account number and notes worth keeping, and its own history. Money moves between them and the till with Move money on the Cash drawer page.

Expenses

What the shop spent, by month and by expense type — the rent, the salaries, the generator, what was paid to suppliers — read off the same day book the drawer keeps. Filing something under the wrong type is put right here, without touching the money.

Bills

What the shop owes its suppliers. The invoice book answers who owes us; this answers who we owe — every supplier invoice, what it charged, what is still outstanding and how long it has been waiting. Settling one writes the obligation down; it does not move the drawer, because a bill is not a payment.

Suppliers

Who the shop buys from. One line each — the name, the number your own books know them by, and how to reach them — so that “Electroslab”, “electroslab” and “Electro slab” are one supplier and not three. It fills itself as bills and orders name people.

Supplier Credit

Money sent ahead to suppliers, and the orders it paid for. Add a credit with the dollars you sent and the yuan the supplier received: the day's dollar-to-yuan rate is looked up, the yuan are valued at it, and what is left of the dollars is the transfer fee. Every purchase order naming the supplier is taken out of their credit at its goods total.

Journal

A manual journal — entries written by hand for adjustments and bookkeeping, each one balancing its debits against its credits. It does not post itself from sales, payments or expenses; those are the rest of Accounting's to record. Save an entry as a draft to look at again, and post it once it is final.

Annual report

A financial year, read out of every book the shop keeps: revenue counted once across sales orders, official invoices and the drawer; cost of goods sold rather than bought; every exclusion named with a count and a value. Two files come out — a workbook and a designed report — and neither is published if the year fails its checks.

Statistics

What the shop took over a period, how much of it was lira, what it cost to be open, and what the drawer did — read off the same day book, in dollars at the rate each payment was taken at.

Customers

Everyone the shop knows: what they have bought, what they have spent, and the company and address an official invoice needs. Search by name, email or phone — a phone number can be typed the way it is written on a card.

Prep queue

Carts sent to the shop floor. Employees work these in the picking app at /prep — this is the counter's view of what is being picked.

Set aside

Kits built as far as the shelf allowed and put by, each waiting on a part that was not there. Nothing in them is sellable and none of them counts as prepared — but the parts inside have left stock, because they are in a box.

Stock alerts

What the floor found on the shelf when it did not match the screen. Raised from the picking app at /prep — usually the first anyone knows a count has gone wrong.

Tasks

Jobs that are not picking lists — clean the storeroom, count the resistor drawer, ring the supplier. Write one down and give it to somebody; it appears on their phone in the picking app at /prep, and what they say about it comes back here. Leave the name blank and the first person free can take it.

Wishlist

Who asked for what, and whether it is in yet. Anything the shop already lists is watched against the shelf by itself — when it arrives the row turns and the sidebar counts it, so nobody has to remember. Something the shop does not stock is written down in words and marked in by hand. Most asked for adds it all up, so the next order to the supplier is decided by what people actually came in for.

Delivery

Orders going out of Beirut with a courier. Book one from its order page, write down who is taking it and what they collect at the door, then print the sheet that travels with the parcel. The waybill is the courier's own number — scanned or typed off their paper — and once it is here the sheet carries it as a barcode, the parcel sticker prints it, and Shopify shows it to the customer as tracking.

Employees

Everybody who signs in — here, or to the picking app at /prep. What they do decides what they see: a new account starts on the shop floor with the picking app and nothing else, and Permissions opens the menu on the left so you can switch on exactly the entries they need, one at a time.

Activity log

Every action anybody took — at this counter and on the shop floor — with the person who took it and the minute they did. Sign-ins, prices, orders, invoices, stock, staff accounts: all of it, including the attempts that failed. Kept in the same place as the books, so a deploy cannot take it away.

Products

Scan or search for anything in the catalogue to see its price, its stock at every location, and which shelf it is on. Prices and shelf codes can be changed here; everything else stays in Shopify.

Reprice

When a supplier's list moves, a whole shelf moves with it. Find the products, say how much — a percentage or an amount, up or down, or one price for all of them — and see what every one of them becomes before anything is written. Prices are read from Shopify again at the moment of writing, so a price changed at the counter in the meantime is raised from what it really is now.

Projects

Parts pulled off the shelf for a build. Adding an item takes it out of stock straight away — it has left the shelf, so Shopify should say so. Anything that turns out not to fit goes back with one click; whatever is still held when you close the project counts as used.

Kits

A kit is a set of products sold as one item, with its own barcode and price. Send a kit to prep to have boxes assembled ahead of time — assembling takes the parts out of stock, and selling then takes a prepared kit. Anything sold beyond what is prepared comes out of the parts, worked out live from the component stock in Shopify. The product a kit is sold as shows what this page says: the kit's price, and its prepared boxes as the count in stock — never below zero.

Most used parts

Every part across every kit, ranked. Sold in kits is how many went out inside the kits that sold over the period — each kit's count of the part times how many of that kit sold, read from Shopify's orders on every channel, net of refunds. Total qty is how many go into one of each kit, all added up. Kits is how many kits list it at all.

Which kits use a part?

Search for an item — 0.5W 330 ohm resistor, a product name, a barcode — and every kit that uses it comes back, with how many go into one of each kit. Both the words the kits' own parts lists use and the product's name in Shopify are searched, so it does not matter which of the two you happen to know.

Pickup labels

Stickers for orders waiting to be collected: a number — one, or a run with a sticker each — or anything you write yourself. Big, bold and alone on the paper.

Labels

Shelf labels on the shop's own Datamax printer: scan or search, and the name, barcode and price come out on sticky paper.