Kitting

Kitting is selling several separate items together as one thing with one price, such as a gift box holding a candle, a mug and a card. A starter kit for a new barber works the same way, with clippers, oil and a cape inside it. The customer buys one item, but the stockroom gives up three.

That gap is the whole difficulty, because the kit exists on the shelf and in the accounts but not in the stockroom, where only its parts exist. So when a kit sells, the system has to reach in and take one candle, one mug and one card out of stock, each from its own count. If it records only one gift box sold, the three real counts stay too high, and within a month nobody trusts the stock figures at all.

Get it right and the same three items can still be sold on their own, because the candle sits on the shelf at its own price and also inside the box. Both routes pull from the same candle count, and that is the test to put to any supplier before you sign. Ask them to sell you a kit, then check whether the parts went down. Many systems fail that quietly, which is why Linkysoft has replaced a few of them.

Storek writes the recipe of a kit once, so every sale takes the parts out at that moment, in the shop and on the website alike. It also stops the kit being sold when one part has run out, which is the second thing people forget. A gift box with no card in it is a complaint rather than a sale.

Price is where owners lose money without noticing, because a kit is usually cheaper than the parts bought separately and that discount has to come off somewhere. Decide whether it comes off each part or off the kit as a whole. That one choice changes what your profit report says for the rest of the year. Linkysoft asks this at the start of every shop project, and it is why a kitting rule often ends up in a custom web application rather than a spreadsheet. Returns are the same problem backwards, because when a customer brings a kit back the three parts have to go back on the shelf. Only a system that knew the recipe can put them there.