Selling products in your business and tracking stock without a notebook

In an appointment-based business, the schedule has a ceiling: only so many hours fit. The product a client takes home does not. The shampoo recommended at the basin, the serum used in the treatment room, the interdental brush the hygienist suggests: every sale is margin that takes up not a single minute of the schedule.

And yet it is the margin most businesses let slip. Not for lack of clients who buy, but because of how it is handled.

Why product sales slip away

Almost always for one of three reasons:

1. It is not recorded. It is paid in cash, "I'll note it down later", and at the end of the day the till does not balance and nobody knows what was sold.
2. It runs out without warning. The best-selling hairspray runs out at noon on a Saturday, and whoever wanted it leaves without it. With luck they come back; often they buy it somewhere else.
3. It is charged separately. One ticket for the service and another for the product, or a notebook for the second. Two accounts someone has to put together afterwards.

None of these is a sales problem. They are record-keeping problems, and they are solved with a system in which selling and keeping count are the same action.

Charge it on the same ticket as the appointment

Product sales go better when they are charged with the visit, not as a separate step. The client is already at the counter paying for their cut or their cleaning: adding the shampoo to the same ticket takes a second, and everything stays together — the service and the product, each with its price and its VAT — in a single payment.

That has two effects. Whoever is on the counter does not have to remember to note anything anywhere else. And when the day is closed, what was sold is inside the till, split by payment method like everything else, not in a notebook that has to be added up separately.

For it to be genuinely quick, the product is looked up by name or scanned with the barcode reader, just as in any shop.

Stock that moves on its own

Knowing what is left on the shelf should not require counting it every week. It is enough for stock to move with what happens:

• Sale: each product charged takes one unit off, on its own.
• Refund: if the whole ticket is refunded, the units come back.
• Delivery: when the supplier's order arrives, what came in is recorded.
• Stock count: every so often the shelf is counted and what is really there is recorded; the difference is noted.

If every movement is recorded with its reason — this sale, this delivery, this count — you never again wonder why you have what you have. A difference in the count stops being a mystery and becomes a fact: a tester that was opened, a bottle that broke, a sale that was not charged.

The minimum: order before you run out

Each product gets a minimum: the number below which it is worth reordering. It is not zero; it is the point at which there is still time for the order to arrive before it runs out.

With that number set, the question "what do I need to order?" has an instant answer: the list of what is below its minimum. The supplier order is placed with that list in front of you, and the Saturday hairspray no longer runs out.

A sale should never be blocked

A detail that sounds technical and is not. If the system believes there are no units of a product left, the sale has to go through anyway: the bottle is in your client's hand, and what is wrong is the number, not the sale. The sensible thing is to charge and flag the product for checking at the next stock count.

Software that stops you charging for what is in front of you because its count does not add up turns a stock discrepancy into a lost sale and a client left waiting.

How ClaudIA does it

In ClaudIA, what you sell at the counter has its own catalogue next to the till: each product with its price, its brand, its barcode and its minimum. When you take payment for the appointment you add it to the same ticket, its stock goes down on its own, and deliveries and stock counts are recorded. Whoever runs the counter can record what arrives and what they count; the catalogue and the prices are changed by whoever runs the business.

It is explained step by step for salons at soyclaudia.app/en/funciones/productos-y-existencias and for clinics at soyclaudiadental.com/en/funciones/productos-y-existencias-clinica-dental.

And if what you are after is every client leaving with something more than their service, here is how to increase the average ticket without pressuring anyone and which numbers to check every week to know whether it is working.