I need a Physical Inventory scanner

lotus81

At work, we have Retail Pro as our POS. I love it but lately I have been noticing our inventory is off. I don't know why. So I contacted our Retail Pro provider and they said we need to do a physical inventory. We usually do PI manually, just go and count. I understand that could be where we went wrong.

Now our provider quoted insane prices.

To rent the PI Scanners, it would be $100 a day per scanner. We have over 10,000 music cds. There are 6 of us. I think it would take us about 2-3 days to complete our inventory.

To purchase a PI scanner, they said $1,800 for 1. And the kicker is that the scanner is discontinued so we would be purchasing a used one. :v: It's pretty much the same price as renting.

Does anyone know of a more affordable one that will work with Retail Pro? Would it work right out of the box or would there be more software needed?

Thank you for everyone's help in advance.

Killgrimage

If you are looking for something specifically compatible with your current system, you might be SOL. Would you consider converting to a different one so that you can do some shopping around? Otherwise, yeah, those scanners are fucking expensive.

evilmrhenry

What you need is the model numbers of any compatible scanners. Then you can do eBay searches or something. I know the Quickbooks POS scanner runs about $600 new, so there's the possibility of getting it much cheaper.

What worries me is that "Retail Pro" doesn't list a price for anything on their site. That screams "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" to me.

EDIT: What kind of problems are you getting? Counts over or under? By how much on average?

truck-a-sauras

I don't know anything about Retail Pro, but I do work with many industrial barcode scanners. Music CD's should just have regular barcodes on there like RS style, nothing fancy like 2D datamatrix, so you can get away with a simple scanner which should not cost over $1000. If it can transmit the barcode back to the software I would hope the software would have the tools to manipulate the data in a desired form.

http://www.barcodesinc.com/symbol/mc1000.htm

http://www.hallogram.com/barcodes/categories/0034.html

http://www.waspbarcode.com/scanners/wws500_barcode_scanner.asp

stormbringer

If its a one time gig, cheap simple scanner dropping the data into excel and a bit of VBA and your done. not more then 100$

Depends on what your time is worth and what your shrink rate is.

There are some decent iPhone apps as well for scanning which might work as well. A P count might be easier through.

Daenris

lotus81 wrote: »

To rent the PI Scanners, it would be $100 a day per scanner. We have over 10,000 music cds. There are 6 of us. I think it would take us about 2-3 days to complete our inventory.

To purchase a PI scanner, they said $1,800 for 1. And the kicker is that the scanner is discontinued so we would be purchasing a used one. :v: It's pretty much the same price as renting.

I think you might be overestimating how long it will take a bit, unless you have a lot more than 10,000 cds. If all 6 of you work 8 hours in 1 day, you only need to scan 4 cds per minute to inventory about 11,500 cds. So if that's something that you could schedule, putting everyone on for 1 day of inventory (or 3 on 1 day 3 on the next, 2/2/2/ or whatever works with your schedule) you can get it done for a rental price of $600. I've done inventory in retail stores, and you should be able to easily scan at least 4 cds per minute.

Though, in the long term you probably do want to own your own scanners so you can inventory again, so it makes sense to look around for cheaper purchase options.

pacbowl

I work for a Retail Pro vendor and know the software fairly well.

The old staple is the Percon PT2000, however it has to be programmed for use with Retail Pro, which is probably why it's so expensive from your vendor. Retail Pro charges an arm and a leg for their custom programming. The laser tophat is extra too, but it's no frills and rock solid. We rent these out when our customers need them for PI.

Another inventory scanner we sell is the Janam Palm XP30. No custom programming needed and it's nice, but is probably total overkill for what you need it for.

For cheap, wired solutions, you could always pick up a Metrologic Voyager or Symbol scanner (or any other scanner that outputs text) and some USB extensions and scan inventory directly into Retail Pro without using the expensive wireless ones that upload via cradle. Hell, you probably already have a scanner at your cashwrap. You could use that, but you would need to bring the inventory up to the POS to scan it, or use USB extensions to run it around the store. I don't know if there's a limit on how long a USB cable can be though.

lotus81

Hello. Thanks for everyone's comments and advice.

Most of the inventory seems accurate. But sometimes we notice popular items have more on hand stock than what is listed on Retail Pro.

I think I'm going to rent it and try it out first for one day.

But one of my co workers said he has a symbol ppt2700 that scans barcodes unfortunately it doesn't power up. Bad battery he thinks.

I went online and found that some retail pro provider do rent out the symbol scanners but they do not provide which symbol scanners. I'm still going to try it and see. Just need to find the battery.

I'm definitely going to try ebay also.

Bowen

Man if all you have is an inventory system you could do better by switching to a company that won't shaft you in the ass for something that could be done by a couple of kids with visual basic, a text based hand scanner, and a week to tie it into a google/paypal API.

lotus81

Google hit it big like in 2005. I think our business had Retail Pro since 2001. And we spent butloads of money on Retail Pro.

So I do wish we had a more economical POS/Inventory system, however we are basically tied to Retail Pro for life. I do feel I have to defend Retail Pro. It's a pretty resourceful software to manage customers, buying patterns, and sales charts.

I was just on ebay looking at the symbol ppt2700 and they're going about $20 bucks each. The charger goes about $50 bucks. So the search is looking good.

Cajiggers

How much did you spend on Retail Pro?

mehmehmeh

for inventory we use a cheap symbol ls2208 barcode scanner with a ps2 keyboard wedge cable with a ps2 -> usb adapter + usb extension cable going to a laptop. scan everything into excel and save as a csv or tab delimited file. (I'm not familiar with retail pro so i don't know how they handle data imports)

might not be what you're looking for but it was cheap ($25-40 shipped for the scanner on ebay with a bit of hunting, misc. cables under $10) and works for us. The symbol scanners are very programmable. we got a LS1902 scanner, although it's a newer model it doesn't seem to scan as fast as the ls2208. People seem to charge more for the native USB cables for the symbol scanners, you get pretty much the same effect using the ps2 cable and usb adapters.

lotus81

Retail Pro cost us $20k+.

The software alone was like $5k. And then the number of licenses per computer with the software. Then there's a tech support fee and the membership fee.

I know I know, everyone will be thinking WTF?

But before Retail Pro, we were handwriting everything. Nothing was inventoried. The amount of theft we had supassed to the cost of Retail Pro.

Since we implemented Retail Pro, theft is about $500 a year (maybe less because most items are misplaced rather than stolen.)

Bowen

I am in the wrong business.

RCCWest

Those are not the only scanners for Retail Pro. We use scanners from Cipher Labs that have been programmed to output how Retail Pro needs it. We have some of our old CPT-711 scanners that can be sold if anyone needs them. We have 15 in total. PM me if interested.

Ograce

Hello,

Does anyone know how to config a new PT2000 scanner to work with RPro?

I think I am looking for the hex files.

O

ceres

If you have a new question, make a new thread.