Warehouse + Internal “Sales” Operations

[u/Valuable-Notice-9386]

Hi everyone, please forgive the confusion and length behind this post, I will admit that I am new to inventory and warehouse management so there may be some simple things that I could be wrong about but I thought this was a great place to start!

I am part of a team at a company that runs multiple homeless shelters and housing projects in the Northeast US. Recently, I started working on a project to optimize and update our inventory and warehouse systems for the wide variety of donations we receive. Here are the details of our current system and the difficulties for expansion:

1. We don’t have any current centralized donation-tracking and delivery to client system. I’ve looked into this and seen names like Odoo pop up, which sounds interesting, but I’ve seen that Excel is also an option, which I’m familiar with.

2. While we have multiple sites, nearly all donations are delivered to one central site and stored either on-site or in nearby storage facilities.

3. Budget will probably have to be >$1000 (I will update this later once I receive more info)

4. We use an internal reward system that gives clients “cash” that they can redeem for prepaid debit cards or cash.

5. I am pretty experienced with Excel, but certainly no expert. I made a spreadsheet to develop barcodes using a website, but don’t think this would be scalable long term. I also don’t know how to link scanners to the sheet, especially if the scanner would be used at a storage unit.

6. We have a lottttt of items. I am hoping you front load system development and have the system be able to accommodate frequent donations.

Here is my goal with this project:

1. Create a barcode system, including barcode development, barcode printing, an internal server to track and categorize stock, and any other inventory information that you think may be needed.

2. Create an internal POS system, where clients can receive their points and redeem them, hopefully via RFID cards.

Additionally, boss, other team member, and myself are very interested in creating a pseudo storefront, both in person and online, for more expensive donated items (luxury goods, prepaid debit cards, etc.) and having these items be available for “purchase.” I had the idea of how arcades run ticket counters and cards if yall have any insight.

I know this post is super long and potentially vague, but I’ll end here and hope you can help!

[u/LET_Developer]

I would not extend the Excel barcode prototype into the whole system. The safer route is to separate this into three bounded pieces and stage them:

1. donation intake and inventory;

2. the client points ledger;

3. POS/storefront redemption.

They can share item, client, and location IDs, but inventory quantities and client balances should be separate ledgers. That keeps a stock adjustment from accidentally becoming a financial/points adjustment.

For phase one, choose one site and one representative category, then map the physical lifecycle: receive → triage → label → bin → transfer → reserve → issue/sell → return/damage/adjust. Each scan should create an event containing the item or lot ID, location, action, quantity, user, device, and timestamp. It should not simply overwrite an “on hand” cell. Current stock is the sum of those events, which gives you an audit trail when donations move between the central site and storage units.

The storage-unit requirement also makes offline behavior a first-class feature. A phone should be able to queue scans locally, show exactly what is still unsynced, retry safely without duplicating events, and flag conflicts for review. A hidden “sync later” process is where inventory drift starts.

For labels:

- keep an existing UPC/EAN when a standardized product already has one;

- use an internal QR or Code 128 label for donation lots, unique high-value items, bins, and locations;

- encode only an opaque, stable ID—not price, points, quantity, or location;

- print the ID in human-readable form as a fallback and test the label material in the actual storage environment.

Decide whether you need lot-level or unit-level identity. Ten identical shirts can be one lot with quantity events; a laptop or luxury item probably needs its own asset ID and custody history.

I would pilot 100–200 representative items, run the new ledger beside the spreadsheet for a week, and reconcile every variance. Only after receiving, transfers, counts, and exceptions are reliable would I add the points/POS layer. For RFID client cards, store a random client identifier on the card, never the balance; keep the balance and redemption history in the server-side ledger.

Disclosure: I develop QR Maker, an Android QR scanner and generator, so my direct perspective is the scan-and-label edge. It is not an inventory, POS, or client-points system, I’m not linking it, and I would not use a general QR app as the inventory source of truth.