What is the best way to get started with inventory management with barcodes?

[LifesDelights]

We are a small clothing and jewlery boutique in a very small town and have purchased the receipt printer, cash drawer, and barcode scanner. We have been playing around with barcoding our inventory and using the scanner to make sales. It is going well, but we still haven't found the most efficent way to do this. These are the areas we are struggling with: Inventory list - Do we keep an excel file update it, then import it to the system? Will it mess up our quantities when we import new products? Or....do we enter everything straight to loyverse and only export it when we want to see a current list? Barcodes - Do we make barcodes for everything or only items that don't have them? Is it better to use preprinted barcodes or make your own? I worry using preprinted ones then you will have a new barcode for each item and the inventory list won't show that you have 3 of the same item because they all have different barcodes. Putting items on sale - I am good with running sales that have % off or even $ off, but if you have something that you move to a sale rack and want to alter the price how can you track the original price and the sale price so we can keep track of the things that didn't sell for the first listed price? If anyone has any tips for implementing this whole system, we would appreciate it. The last few months have been just trying to learn the system, but we would love to start the year with a fully functional system so we get good accurate reports.

[Reinaldo]

About the inventory, what you need to know is that every time you import the file to the back office, all the items will be updated. Therefore, if in the csv file you are importing the stocks amounts says 50, all your items' will change to 50. Basically, all the changes that you do in your items in the csv file will update your actual items in the back office. The system recognices each item based on its SKU, so you can even change their name, the system will still recognice it. I recommend you making some tests importing a small file to understand how it works. If you worry that the same items will have different barcodes then it's better to make your own barcodes for every item, to avoid the situation you described. Currently Loyverse doesn't allow to use different prices for a single item. The solution here could be to create a second item, with a different price, you won't be able to use the same inventory for both of them, but at least you could track their sales.