Gifts and samples: how to record them

In a shop selling tea and dried fruit, a customer asks for half a kilo of raisins. You hold out a handful: "Try them", and for a regular you add another fifty grams on the scale "as a gift". Each gesture is kind and useful, but none of them reaches the notebook. At month end the count is several kilos short and you cannot work out what happened. It is not a shortage at all but an unrecorded issue.

Why they look like a shortage

Gifts, samples and testers reduce the stock but bring in no money. Unrecorded, the balance drops "mysteriously" and the real losses (mistakes, breakage, theft) disappear against that background. There are four kinds:

• gift: goods handed to a customer or partner;
• sample: goods opened for tasting;
• tester: an open item left on the shelf for display;
• promotion: a set sent to a blogger, a giveaway or a partner.

To these add goods taken for yourself or your family, which should be written down as "own use".

Three ways to record

1. Piece goods. You gave away a sealed pack, so the journal gets a row "issue, note: gift" with the date, code and quantity.
2. Goods sold by weight. Set aside a separate dish for tasting. Weigh it in the morning and write the weight down, then weigh it again in the evening. The difference is the day's samples. An example: on Monday morning the dish with the goods weighed 1,000 grams, in the evening 640 remained, so 360 grams went on samples. That is one row: "issue, sample, 0.36 kg".
3. Testers and open packs. Mark an opened pack as "open" and note the weight left. Do not mix it with sealed packs, or at the count you will lose track of which are open.

Value it at cost

To see these issues in money, value the goods at purchase cost, not selling price. An example: cost 85,000 so'm a kilo. In one month:

• samples: about 200 grams a day, 5.2 kg in 26 days, which is 442,000 so'm;
• 50-gram extras for regulars: 60 times, 3 kg in all, which is 255,000 so'm;
• one set sent to a blogger: 120,000 so'm.

Total 817,000 so'm. If the monthly cost of goods sold is 40 million so'm, that is roughly 2 per cent. Not much, but while it stays invisible you cannot control it.

A limit, and measuring the result

Set a ceiling for each type of issue. For example, samples and gifts should not exceed 2 per cent of the monthly cost. A regular gets an extra 50 grams, no more, and agree beforehand who may give such gifts so that a helper does not hand out more on their own initiative.

Check, too, whether samples pay. For one week draw two columns on a sheet: tasted, and bought after tasting. Say 25 people tasted and 11 bought, which is 44 per cent (an illustrative figure). If most people taste and buy nothing, give fewer samples or change the product.

Record goods sent for a giveaway or to a partner as well: to whom, what, when and why. This is a promotion cost, and it can be compared with other costs.

Tea taken by you or your staff for themselves is an ordinary issue too. Add a separate "own use" note in the journal and total it once a month. Owners often cannot recall this sum themselves; written down, family and business spending do not blur. If staff are used to being given tea and sweets, record that the same way: not as punishment but for exact figures.

Conclusion

Gifts and samples are not bad, they bring customers in. What is bad is that nobody sees them. Record the kind, quantity and value of each issue and you can tell a shortage from a true loss, you know your promotion cost and you can control it. If there is no time to find out where a count difference came from, the Sanab team counts the goods and shows the gaps between the balance and the documents in a report.