The stock scanner and shelf labels

Connects a phone or barcode-scanner device to your shop so you can take stock in and out on the shop floor, away from a desk. Like the till, the scanner runs in its own restricted session — this page is where you connect it, and where you choose which shelf label you print.

Stock control has three tabs across the top: Scanner & labels (this one), Low stock and Stock locations — the binders, cases, boxes and shelves your cards live in.

Connecting a device

Press Generate connect QR and scan it on the device within 3 minutes. That signs the device into a scanning session.

What the scanner can and can't do

• It can: receive a delivery into stock, take an accepted buylist into stock, correct a count, and print labels.
• It can't: reach your admin, your orders, your customers or your money.
• Sessions time out after 2 hours idle, so a device left on a shelf overnight is signed out by morning rather than sitting there logged in.

Connect as many devices as you like — each scan of a fresh QR is its own session.

It searches by code, not by name

The scanner is not the till. The till finds things by name, because a cashier is looking at a customer. The scanner only ever resolves a code — your SKU, a manufacturer's barcode, or a BL- buylist reference. Type a card's name into it and it finds nothing.

That means a card has to be given a SKU before a scanner can find it. Set it on the variant row under the product's Variants tab, print a label, and from then on the shelf answers to the gun. It is the deliberate order of work for a shop barcoding its stock — label first, scan afterwards.

Scan a code the shop has never seen and it offers to set that item up rather than failing.

Shelf labels

Which label to print is the label you get when you do not say otherwise — you can pick either one every time you print. Print the price on the label suits sealed stock, where the price does not move. Print a QR to the price online suits singles: the customer's phone shows today's price, so the label does not go stale on the shelf, and the till still reads the same square as the card's SKU. Press Save.

A label prints in your browser on every plan: the printer icon on a product, the scanner's Label button and Print a label in Add a variant all open the print dialog for a 62×40mm label. On a plan with tills, and with a till connected, the label window also offers Send to till, which prints on the till's label printer instead.

Receiving a delivery

Scan the code, type how many arrived, and press Receive. It counts the batch first and commits once, because a delivery is rarely a single card and thirty separate scans of the same box is thirty chances to lose count.

There is one set of books. Whatever the scanner shows on the shelf is the same figure the admin shows, the storefront sells from and the till reads. The scanner is a device, not a second stock system to reconcile.

What to do next

• Items at or below their reorder point are listed on the low-stock report.
• Customer trade-ins arrive in the buylist queue; accepting a list there and scanning it in on the shop floor are two halves of the same job.