The Mothers of Inventory

    One thing I can look forward to at the end of every year is the year-end inventory for my store, Booknotes.  On the last day before Christmas that the store is open, I rearrange all of the books so I can more easily tell what books I have counted and which ones I haven't.  I usually do the inventory even before I take down the decorations.  For various reasons, I can't take down all the decorations down all at once anyway.  Some can only be taken back home when the weather is dry.  Others are so big, that I am limited into how much I can fit into the trunk of my car.  There is also little extra room for boxes until I finish moving the books back.  I also make sure I take all of the books out of the window display.  At least once, I forgot a book in the window, and I had to start the count over.  Now, if I just tabulated how much all of the products cost, I would be done in one day, probably.  However, I use a multi-factor method I developed way back from before I had a computer.  I don't just calculate how much the books are worth, I also check on what I have sold over the year to see what I sold and what I didn't.  I already do weekly checks on inventory every Monday based on what I sold the previous week.  However, the year-end check is more on trends.  I also add the 'discount' decal to every book that has been here for ten years.  We tell people that we offer a discount on said books, but not the reason why.  For the fiction, it usually doesn't matter how old the book is.  For some of the nonfiction, we offer bigger discounts.  Just this year, we finally sold a book predicting the future, up to the year 2012.  That book came out before 2000 and got a huge discount.  Anyway, I chronologically go over each packing list from each order, moving each book after I count them.  I then total up the cost of each order, to come up with a running list of costs.  Some orders are the same, so I don't have to recheck them to make sure I added correctly.  Orders where we sold books have to be rechecked before I move onto the next one.   Sure, this leads to hundreds of subtotals, some with only one or two books, compared to about forty if I just did it per shelf.  However, this way I can see yearly trends as well as comparative analysis, without the use of a computer.  For instance, when the store first opened, my mother and I had large lists from two distributors of suggestions of opening stock.  Books could be eliminated either singly or by entire page.  Well, my mother eliminated the entire literature section from one distributor, wrongly thinking that the much smaller selection from the other would be sufficient.  In retaliation, (remember, I have a BA in English), I eliminated most of the romance section from that one as well, possibly even a book by an author my mother wanted to order due to one of her workmates.  Well, after that debacle, we agreed not to eliminate entire pages ever again without fully consulting each other.  I was proven right though, as literature has been the store's most constant bestselling category, as it has the fewest books on discount.  This is comparison to business, including careers and personal finance, which still has most of the books from that original shipment still in stock.  Almost the entire category is on huge discount.  A few other categories have sold well in the past, but not great now.  Oh, after all the books are counted, I go over the non-book products.  There are not too many of these.  This year, it was almost entirely chocolate-covered cherries.  I waited until the last day of the year we were open to count those, as we were still selling them fairly consistently.  Because the last day of the year was a Sunday, when the store is closed, I technically waited until Tuesday, January 2, to actually calculate everything, just in cast we had to open the store for an emergency to make a sale.  So, the grand totals have been added up.  The Christmas decorations are down, and the Valentine's Day hearts are being put up.  I just need to come up with good idea for my new "Making the Logo" video for my YouTube channel, but I am ready for the new year at my store.