Set up barcode stock with just your phone.
You do not need a scanner, a stock-take weekend, or a consultant. Here is the realistic way to get a small shop's inventory onto a phone — starting with twenty products, not two thousand.
Do not start with a full stock-take
This is the mistake that kills it. Someone decides to digitise the shop, blocks out a Sunday, gets through ninety products, loses the will to live, and the whole thing is abandoned by Wednesday.
Start with the products that actually move. In most shops a small handful of lines make up the bulk of sales. Get those in — twenty is plenty — and add everything else the first time someone buys it. Within a fortnight the shop is mostly in, and you never lost a Sunday.
Step 1 — Scan it
Open Products, choose to add one, and point your camera at the barcode. Bienzoli reads the standard retail formats — EAN-13, EAN-8, UPC-A, UPC-E — plus QR codes, using a scanner that runs on your device rather than sending pictures anywhere.
Step 2 — Check what comes back
For products the world already knows, Bienzoli looks the code up in a public catalogue and suggests a name, brand, description and picture. For local goods and spare parts it usually finds nothing — that is normal and not a problem.
Either way you check it before it saves. The catalogue does not know your shop, and the suggestion is only a starting point.
Type the name the way you say it. The catalogue might call something "Ariel Professional Liquid Detergent 5L". If you and your staff call it "Ariel 5L", call it that. The name only exists so a human can find it in a hurry.
Step 3 — Price and count it
Set your selling price and how many are on the shelf right now. That opening count is recorded as a movement, so months later you can still see where the number started.
Cost price is optional. Fill it in if you know it — it is stored, and it costs you nothing to have.
Step 4 — Set the low-stock level honestly
Every product has a level that triggers a warning — five by default. The useful question is not "what feels low" but how long your supplier takes. If a delivery takes two weeks and you sell three a week, a warning at five is already too late. Set it at eight and you get warned while you can still act.
Step 5 — Then stop maintaining it
This is the whole point. Once a product is in, every counter sale and every invoice takes it off the count automatically. You are not updating anything in the evening.
Each change is recorded with a reason — opening, restock, adjustment, or the specific sale that consumed it — and the balance it left behind. When a number eventually looks wrong, you can read back what happened. The stock control page goes into that history in more detail.
Making your own barcodes
For unlabelled goods, you can print your own codes and stick them on. Worth it for things you sell constantly and hate searching for; not worth it for the long tail. Searching by name is fine for products you touch once a week.
What this will not solve
Bienzoli has no purchase orders, no supplier records, no multi-warehouse stock, no expiry dates and no stock valuation or margin reporting. It answers "what is on the shelf and what moved" — which for most small shops is the question that was actually unanswered.