How to track parts and stock without a POS

Plenty of good workshops run without a point-of-sale system, and for a one or two bench shop that's a defensible call: a POS is a monthly bill, a migration and a training job, and it mostly solves problems a till and a bank feed already solve. What it does solve is parts, and that's where the no-POS shop bleeds. The bike that sits three days waiting on a cable you thought you had. The chain you fitted and forgot to bill. The order placed twice because two people looked at the same empty hook. None of that needs a POS to fix. It needs a short list, kept honestly.

Count the lines that actually move

The instinct is to count everything, which is why most stocktakes are started once and never repeated. Don't. Count the parts that turn over and that stop a job when they're missing: cables and outers, pads in your three common fitments, tubes, chains, cassettes, bar tape, tubeless sealant, the bearings you go through. For most workshops that's 30 to 60 lines, not 600. Everything else can stay uncounted until it earns a place on the list.

1. 1Give each line a SKU, even a made-up one, and write it the same way every time. The SKU is what lets a scan, an order and a count agree with each other later.
2. 2Record what's on the shelf now. Leave it blank rather than guessing: an unknown count is honest and a wrong count is worse than none.
3. 3Set a reorder point per line: the number at which you'd want to order, not the number at which you'd run out. Lead time is the difference between those two.
4. 4Recount the fast movers monthly and the rest when you happen to touch them. A rolling count survives; an annual stocktake doesn't.

Velobook keeps your own stock counts with exactly those four fields, item, SKU, on hand and reorder at, with a blank count stored as unknown rather than zero, so "we've never counted these" and "we're out of these" never get confused. You can import the lot from a spreadsheet on a SKU match, and keep separate counts per location, which matters the moment a van or a second site is carrying its own float.

Scan the barcode instead of typing the SKU

Typing part numbers at the bench is where stock records go to die: it's slow, it's done with greasy hands, and one transposed digit creates a phantom line nobody trusts again. Scanning fixes the accuracy problem and the willingness problem at once. You don't need a dedicated terminal for it, either. Velobook scans from a phone or tablet camera, and it also takes a cheap handheld USB or Bluetooth scanner, the sort that types what it reads. Scan a part to drop it straight onto a customer's quote, scan it onto a job, or scan a box in against an order when the delivery lands. The first time you scan something Velobook doesn't recognise, you bind that code to the product once and it's known forever.

Keep the part attached to the job that needs it

The expensive failure in a small workshop isn't miscounting, it's a bike parked against the wall waiting on a part nobody can name. Parts should live against the booking, not on a whiteboard: what's needed, whether it's on the shelf, whether it's on order, and whether it's actually been billed. Velobook shows the parts a job is waiting on right on the booking, and flags a part that was added to the job but never put on a quote, which is the quiet leak in most shops. When the job is finished, the stock comes off your counts automatically, so the shelf number stays true without a second act of admin.

Order from a list, not from memory

Ordering by memory at 5pm on a Friday is how you end up with three of one thing and none of another. Build the boring plumbing once and the ordering does itself.

• Keep supplier details in one place. Order email, account number, minimum order, freight-free threshold and typical lead time. That last one is what turns a reorder point from a guess into a number.
• Let approved work create the demand. When a customer approves a quote with a part you don't have, that part should join the order list by itself rather than relying on someone remembering.
• Raise a real purchase order. Draft it, send it, and keep it open until the goods arrive. A PO is what lets you answer "did we actually order that?" without ringing the rep.
• Receive against the order, including part deliveries. Tick off what turned up, note what came damaged or wrong, and leave the rest outstanding. Half a delivery is normal and your records should be able to say so.
• Tell the customer their part is in on purpose, not automatically. A part landing rarely means the bike is ready. Make that a decision you take when the job can genuinely move.

Velobook covers this end to end: suppliers, an ordering list fed from approved quotes, purchase orders you can send by email or mark as sent when you order by phone, and a goods receipt that handles partial deliveries and puts what arrived back onto your counts.

What changes if you add a POS later

Nothing you've built here is wasted. Once a shop connects a POS, the stock numbers come from the POS instead, and Velobook reads them rather than writing to them: it will never quietly reserve, decrement or adjust stock inside your till system, because two systems both moving the same number is how inventory becomes fiction. Your hand-kept counts stay separate and untouched by a sync. Shops on Lightspeed, Ascend or Shopify get the parts lookup, the ordering list and the job-side parts view reading live from the POS, with the same barcode scanning on top.

Pitfalls to avoid

• Counting everything. A 600-line stocktake is abandoned by line 200. Count what moves and what blocks a bike.
• Zero standing in for unknown. They're different facts and treating them the same trains everyone to ignore the number.
• Reorder points set at zero. By the time the hook is empty you're already a week from having it, and a bike is already waiting.
• Parts fitted but never billed. It's the single most common margin leak in a small workshop, and it's invisible unless something flags it.
• Two people ordering. One list, one person raising orders, or you'll pay freight twice for the same cassette.