A warehouse full of things nobody can find
Your social enterprise collects donated furniture, white goods, electricals and household items, refurbishes them with trainees, and sells them at affordable prices or passes them to families referred by partners. The warehouse is busy: sofas arriving, a washing machine waiting for a part, a stack of chairs waiting for sanding, lamps waiting for electrical testing.
Intake is a paper sheet on a clipboard. Each item gets a sticker if someone remembers. A customer rings asking about the oak wardrobe they saw last week; nobody can find it on the sheet, and it turns out it was sold on Saturday. An electrical item goes on the shop floor before it has been tested, because it looked like the one next to it that had. The funder wants the weight of goods diverted from landfill, and the sheet does not record weights.
Why reuse stock is hard to track
Reuse is unlike ordinary retail. Every item is different, arrives at random, and passes through several stages before it can be sold.
| Stage | What needs recording | What usually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Arrival | What it is, where it came from, condition, weight | Clipboard, often incomplete |
| Assessment | Sell, repair, strip for parts or recycle | Decided and forgotten |
| Repair | Work done, parts used, by whom | Not recorded |
| Testing | Electrical or appliance test results | Separate sheet or label |
| Pricing | Price and channel | By eye, on the day |
| Sale or gift | Sold, gifted to referred family, or recycled | Till or paper |
Testing and safety requirements for electrical items and furniture are for your competent staff and any regulations and scheme rules that apply. We do not advise on those. We make sure the status and records are there so untested items do not get sold.
What untracked stock costs
Safety is the serious risk. An item sold without the testing your process requires is a risk to the buyer and to your organisation.
Sales are lost when items cannot be found, or when good items wait in repair for weeks because nobody can see the queue. Reporting suffers too, since funders and councils often want figures on items reused and weight diverted from landfill.
Trainee work is invisible. The repairs and refurbishments trainees do are central to what you achieve, and they are not recorded anywhere.
Item-level intake with a status for every piece
What we build gives every item a record and a status, from the moment it arrives.
- At arrival, a staff member or trainee logs the item on a tablet: category, description, photo, condition, source, and weight from a scale or a standard weight per category.
- Each item gets a printed label with a QR code, so anyone can scan it to see its record and status.
- Assessment sets its route: sell as is, repair, test, strip for parts or recycle, with the reason.
- Repairs and parts are logged against the item, with the trainee who worked on it, so the work shows in their progress record.
- Items that need testing cannot move to 'ready for sale' until a test result is recorded by a person your process authorises.
- Pricing is suggested from category and condition, and set by a staff member. Ready items can be listed online and in the shop from the same record.
- Sale, gifting to a referred family, or recycling closes the record, feeding reports on items reused and weight diverted.
Where you already use a till or online shop, ready items flow to it, so the shop and warehouse agree.
A day in the warehouse, afterwards
A van unloads five items. A trainee logs each on the tablet, photographs it and prints a label. The washing machine goes to 'repair', the lamps to 'test', the dining table to 'ready' after a quick clean. When the electrical tester finishes the lamps, she scans each label and records the result; two pass and go on sale, one fails and is marked for recycling.
A customer rings about the oak wardrobe. The volunteer scans the search, sees it was sold on Saturday, and suggests a similar one that went on sale this morning.
Does your warehouse work like this?
- Intake is logged on paper, if at all.
- You cannot see what is waiting for repair or testing.
- Items have reached the shop floor before testing.
- You cannot say how much weight you diverted from landfill last quarter.
- Trainees' repair work is not recorded.