.
You have
probably had these books in your store for quite some time, so why think
they will sell right away? You
should handle them at the end of the process, and as time permits.
Having a BookAccents label on every one of your books will surely make it very easy for you to find them and start invoicing them. You will need to determine how to integrate your invoicing (cash register) into your business, but I think this section will show you how to enter these books into inventory and print labels.
First, labels are most easily printed directly from the Label Screen. To make this task as easy as possible, we recommend that you pre-sort the books. In order to correctly label and categorize the books, sort them by Genre, i.e. General Fiction, Science Fiction, True Crime, etc. See Genre/Category List. If possible, try to comply with our genres and two digit abbreviations. We will be happy to ADD any that do not appear on our list. Additionally you might want to sort out the books that have U.S. ISBNs from the ones with UK ISBNs
Next, pull out and set aside all books
whose ISBNs are not easily identified.
You have
probably had these books in your store for quite some time, so why think
they will sell right away? You
should handle them at the end of the process, and as time permits.
You will soon learn to quickly identify which bar-codes will correctly scan into BookAccents. Look at the extended codes. If they do not start with a "5", or are all zeroes, this is generally not a bar-code that your scanner's hardware can decode.
Now take the time to CORRECTLY set up all of the parameters on your label printing screen Trade Bar-code Label Screen. Now start scanning books in batches of 10 to 25 books. Place the labels on these books, and go to the next batch. When some parameter changes, make the necessary changes to the label screen parameters on go on.
You may assign the book to a shelf location at the time the labels are printed by typing the anticipated shelf location into the Location Field on the Trade Bar-code Label Screen, or you may assign the location when the books are re-stocked on your shelves, using a portable scanner. You decide, whichever is easier. Of course, each time a book is moved you should re-associate the book with its new location.
Please note: We have operated for the past two years without shelf locations for our General Fiction and Adventure Suspense Mass Market Paperbacks. These were just sorted alphabetically within these Genres. Finding the books is easily accomplished because we know that these books are in one of these two areas sorted by author (when we do a look-up). Why? When we originally stocked and labeled the books for our new store, these were the first labeled, and we did not have the portable bar-code reader software completed. To be honest, we did not think about implementing this feature at first. When we do this year's inventory, we are going to assign each book a shelf location. Either way seems to work.
We were neophytes when we started building our computer inventory. I personally had severe hang-ups about placing the proper book in the correct genre. "Does Nora Roberts belong in General Fiction or Romance? Oh, NO, we have some of her books in both genres!" Yes, in a manual operation, this makes quite a difference, and should be cause for concern. You have already solved this dilemma by implementing BookAccents. Your problems are solved in two ways. First the genre that you select is printed on the label in such a way that is it visible on the books' spines. The person stocking books doesn't have to make that decision. Second, when the books are stocked on shelves, you scan the book to associate it with the exact shelf location on which it lives. If someone is looking for Nora Roberts' books, when you look them up, BookAccents displays the Genre and the books' (last known) locations.