Quickbooks Pro and barcoded jewelry tags

Hi,

I use Quickbooks Pro to manage my Jewelry inventory and for my
accounting. I want to print jewelry tags that are barcoded for my
jewelry items. It would have to integrate with Quick Books which is
where I am finding trouble. I have not run into an elegant solution
yet. Has anyone had any luck in this area?

Thanks,
Vikas

Hi Vikas,

In one of my previous lives, I did a lot with barcoding. Currently,
I use QB Pro for my business. Near as I can tell, (not that I’ve
tried much) there isn’t any direct way to get barcodes to work with
QB.

You can get stand-alone barcode scanners for not much. ($100 or so)
If you configure them properly, they’ll scan a barcode, and then
present the number to the computer in such a way that the computer
thinks somebody typed it on the keyboard. If you can find a way to
get a field in QB wherein it expects some sort of numeric or
alphanumeric input to designate a particular item, then you can use
barcodes. Otherwise not. It has more to do with QB than anything
else. (As I think about it now, you could at least rig up your items
such that the barcode would trigger the item in your 'create invoice’
page. I’m not sure how useful that’d be, but it’s possible.)

There’s nothing particularly magical about barcodes themselves,
they’re just a system of characters that the computer can read
easily. There are a variety of different families of barcodes. Some
of them only handle numbers, some will handle letters too, and some
have error checking built in. (Those are the harder ones to code
without specialty software.) The scanners can generally understand
all the common ones without any effort on your part.

If you have to make a choice, 39 or “three of nine” is a good simple
system to use. Failing that, 128 is another good one. The advantage
is that 39 only handles numbers, while 128 can handle letters too.
The drawback is that 128 BC’s are a lot larger. (which can make them
harder to read) The EAN barcodes that are used for UPC take custom
coding and aren’t of much use for a small shop.

For whatever that all’s worth.
Brian.

I also use Quickbooks Pro and barcodes. However, the way I do it is
through the Intuit Point of Sale software. It works like a cash
register and easily accepts scanned data. The Point of Sale will
automatically update Quickbooks but I do it by hand (I had previous
technical difficulties that caused me to have to re-enter 2 months of
data, but that is another story.) You COULD go directly into
Quickbooks if you wanted to. The scanner would have to be on the same
computer as Quickbooks. You just need to have your cursor in the
right place where you want the scanned to go (in either
program.) Remember that scanned barcodes are simply a keyboard
substitute, so scanning the label is the same as if you typed in the
contained in the barcode. It will not automatically move
to the next cell where you want to put more You have to
click on the next spot manually. So, if you are inputting a ton of
it is not as seamless as you may want. I find that it
does save a TON of time when people are checking out in the shop. I
can’t imagine how long it would take to write or type every item’s
part number for the receipt.

I use Bartender software to create the barcoded labels and have a
dedicated Zebra label printer to make the labels. Another piece of
equipment you will need is a scanner. I think setting these things up
may be a challenge to the uninitiated, but once done they work with
little trouble. So, here’s your shopping list:

Barcode label software
Barcode labels
Label printer
Barcode scanner

Susan
Sun Country Gems LLC
http://www.suncountrygems.com

Hi Susan,

Depending on which BC scanner you have, you can rig it to insert
whatever text you want at the end of every scan. A or Line-feed
character for example. Some combination of tabs and LF/Enters should
be enough to trigger the program to move to the next field in the
input screen, which ends your need to manually click on the next
field. If you’ve got a Zebra, all that info is in the manual that
came with the scanner. It’s not fun, but it’s not rocket science
either. A little fiddling should get you there pretty easily. (Just
make sure you find the “reset to factory” code first before you do
anything.)

Regards,
Brian.

Hi Everyone,

There is a intuit product out there called POS for Point of Service.
It is specifically for identifying inventory with bar codes as well
as a million other things. And you can import the into
Quicken and Quickbooks. I’m not sure it’s practical for an
individual. My experience with it was when I worked in a visual Arts
Center Gallery store. There were member shows and holiday gift shows
where we had to track by item and member and then transfer sales
to Quickbooks so the members got paid their commission.

Another option you might try if you have a fancy smart phone is an
app for the phone that creates and reads bar codes. You can then
keep all your inventory on your phone by gallery or any other way you
want to track it.

Hope this helps
Louise Little
In sunny Tucson

Yes, I know that control codes can be part of the barcode allowing
automatically entered return key strokes. In Point of Sale, that
does allow you to scan in a number of different part numbers one
right after the next without manual intervention. However, with
Quickbooks, when you hit the “enter” key, it takes you to a new kind
of field (description, then price, then tax) rather than just going
down a list of the item numbers. That makes it impossible to use
Quickbooks like you would a cash register, scanning item numbers in
quickly unless you include a number of “enters” in each barcode to
take you back to the same field and bypassing all the other fields.
So, technically I was incorrect about the requirement of manually
putting the cursor in the next field. It’s just in my case, I put
only one “end of field” code in my barcode labels which works fine
with my set-up in the Point of Sale program. I have not tried putting
multiple “end of field” codes in a barcode, so don’t know how easy
that would be to do.

Note, the name of the program is “Point of Sale” not “Point of
Service.”

Susan
Sun Country Gems LLC
http://www.suncountrygems.com