From paper tags to real-time reporting: modernizing checkout for a consignment retailer

Creative Colony ran its vendor inventory entirely on paper. Each vendor hand-wrote their price and vendor number on a tag and attached it to their product. At checkout, the cashier had to remove the tag, tape it into a binder for recordkeeping, and ring up the total separately. There was no way for a vendor to know what had sold, or when, without someone manually digging through a binder full of paper tags.

The fix replaced paper tags with barcodes built on Square. Each vendor was set up with their own category, and barcodes were printed for their inventory ahead of time. At checkout, the cashier just scans the item like any standard retail transaction. The lookup, the categorization, and the reporting all happen automatically in the background.

A customer now walks in, picks out items, and the cashier scans a barcode. Each vendor can see exactly what sold and when, in real time. Something that used to require sorting through a physical binder by hand.