Consignment Software Adds Inventory Discounting Features

DALLAS, Nov. 21, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- To spur sales and move inventory quickly, consignment stores typically mark down unsold consignments as time passes. The duration of the discount periods and the amounts of the discounts vary widely, but generally, unsold items are discounted by 25% after 30 days, 50% after 60 days, 75% after 90 days, then after 120 days, the unsold items are either returned to owners, transferred to shop ownership, donated to charity or destroyed.

The complexity of such a practice presents a significant accounting and pricing challenge. Prior to computerization, one approach was to tag merchandise with price tags having different border colors, using a different color for each month. The tags' colors would let clerks know how long items had been in the store and how much to mark down prices at checkout.

With the advent of consignment software, most programs allowed for a Discount Schedule to be saved in the program's memory, so at the start of each day, the program would find items which exceeded a period's allowed time (30, 60, 90 or 120 days) and in the background, reduce prices accordingly and let the store owner know which items needed to be removed from shelves. Discounted items rung up at POS would be priced at discounted prices, making discounts accurate and making discounting of items a-u-t-o-m-a-t-e-d! Quite a time and money saver…

Industry leader Best Consignment Shop Software has programmed in other new and unique special features which make discounting unsold inventory exceedingly more useful and manageable:

The first improvement is multiple discount schedules. With an unlimited number of schedules, store owners (and consignors) can be much more precise in discounting single items. This feature is particularly useful for upper-end merchandise that may be discounted (at a slower rate/over a longer period of time) than something like a baby stroller. It allows for items belonging to family and friends to remain in stores at higher prices, and it moves common inventory out more quickly to free up selling space.

Another nifty new feature is automatically transferring unsold inventory to house ownership (where the consignor has agreed to such an option). In our example, at the end of 120 days, the proceeds of a transferred item would be credited to the store's (house) account only, and retagging would not have been necessary. Moreover, a static price for transferred items can be set in the program, so that the price of each item so transferred automatically becomes, say, $1. One more touch: Items that aren't marked down to a set price can continue to be discounted after transferring to store ownership.

And finally, discounting and transferring ownership in 'BCSS' can be automatic or manual with the latter allowing stores more control over which items are discounted and by how much, and whether items should be transferred to the house account - or not.

Discounting aged inventory and disposing of it are just two time-saving money-saving features of Best Consignment Shop Software.

Please visit http://www.bestconsignmentshopsoftware.com for product and contact information and view a very helpful video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx2POLSwApo.

Steve Henning Best Consignment Shop Software, 702-685-8859, [email protected]

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SOURCE Best Consignment Shop Software