Giving every item a short internal code

Are you tired of typing a long name such as "Men's shirt cotton white, size 44" into your sheet? Or have you ever mixed it up with the neighbouring row "Men's shirt cotton white, 46" and deleted the wrong one? This simple problem has a simple fix: give every item a short, unique internal code. A code speeds up your records, cuts mistakes and makes a later move to software much easier.

What an internal code is and why you need one

An internal code is a number or label for an item that works only inside your shop, for example "SH-044" or "A105". Unlike the manufacturer's barcode, you invent it yourself and you control it.

A code solves three problems:

• Brevity: a few characters go into a sheet, notebook or Telegram message instead of a long name.
• Accuracy: two similar items ("Tea 100 g" and "Tea 200 g") can never be confused, because their codes differ.
• Search speed: in Excel you find the item by its code in a second, and the storekeeper recognises the code on a shelf label without reading the name.

How it differs from a barcode

Most packaged goods carry a factory barcode. It is very handy for scanning at the till, but it does not solve everything. Goods sold by weight (dried fruit, nuts, loose flour) have no barcode. Goods you pack yourself or buy from a local producer may have none either. And different colours and sizes of one model often travel under a single barcode. An internal code fills those gaps, and if a factory code exists you can keep it in a separate column.

How to build a code

The simplest and most durable structure is category label + serial number. For example:

• FL-001, FL-002 for flour and grains;
• TE-001 for tea;
• OL-001 for oils;
• SH-001, SH-002 for shirts.

Use Latin letters: they type the same on any keyboard and cannot be mixed up with look-alike Cyrillic ones. For goods with sizes or colours, add a suffix: SH-001-44, SH-001-46. The base model stays one item and its variants sit on separate lines.

Write the rules down once and let all staff follow them:

1. Each code belongs to exactly one item.
2. The serial number has a fixed length (001, 002, ..., 099), so sorting works properly.
3. Do not put a price, date or supplier name inside a code: they change, and a code must not.
4. The code of a discontinued item is never given to another item, otherwise old sales stick to the new product.
5. Codes live in one list, a "code book", and when a new item arrives its code comes only from there.

How to roll it out

You do not have to code everything in one day. In a small shop this order works: first give codes to your 20 to 30 fastest sellers, then code each new item at the time it is received, and work through the older goods one category a week. Within a couple of months everything is coded, with no shutdowns and no stress.

Put the code column at the far left of your table. For searching in Excel, Ctrl+F or sorting the list by code is enough.

The most common mistakes

• The code is made too complicated (twelve characters, dashes and dots) and nobody can remember it.
• Codes are kept differently in several places: some in Excel, some in a notebook.
• The code is not stuck on the goods, stays only in the sheet and is not visible on the shelf.
• One item gets two codes because nobody bothered to check whether it already exists.

Conclusion

A short internal code is one of the cheapest changes in a shop with the fastest payoff. One day of work saves years of confusion and searching. If you carry a lot of stock and coding it or arranging it on shelves feels difficult, the AniqHisob team can assign codes during a stock count and put location-based storage in order at the same time.