Photograph your stock book

If your stock is written in a book rather than kept on a till, you do not have to type it in. Open Inventory › Move to Swipee, choose Scan stock book, and photograph the pages. Swipee reads them, works out the products, sizes and prices, and shows you everything before a single item is added.

It works the same way for photographs you have already taken (Upload photos) and for a printed list saved as a PDF (Upload PDF).

Taking the photographs

One page per photograph, with the whole page in the frame.

• Lay the book flat and photograph straight down onto it.
• Daylight near a window beats a ceiling light directly overhead — that is what puts a white blot across the middle of the page.
• Fill the frame with the page. You do not need to line it up squarely; a page photographed at an angle is straightened for you.
• Photograph the pages in the order they are written. Sizes written under a product, and products that carry on over a page break, are read using that order.

Swipee finds the edges of the page, crops away the table, straightens it, corrects the angle it was taken at, and evens out the lighting. You will see the tidied-up picture, not the one you took.

When a page is refused

Each page is checked as it arrives. If it is too blurred, too dark, or has glare across the writing, it is marked Take again and the reading will not start until it is replaced.

This is deliberate. A blurred page still produces numbers, and those numbers look exactly like good ones — there is no point later at which anyone can tell that a price was guessed. One more photograph now is cheaper than a wrong price on the shelf for a month.

Use Take again on the page itself; the new photograph keeps that page's place in the book. You can also turn a page, move it up or down, or remove it.

Questions about the whole book

Before the list appears, Swipee asks two or three things it cannot tell from the page, and applies the answer to everything in the book rather than asking you per product:

• Which currency are these prices in? Your book does not usually say, and Swipee will not guess.
• Which shop does this stock belong to? Only if you have more than one.
• Are these quantities single items, or boxes? Only if the numbers look like cases. Answering "boxes" counts them as boxes; it never multiplies your counts by a pack size nobody stated.
• Your book has two money columns — which is which? Only when the book has no headings to say.

Checking what was read

Every row on the review screen can show you the piece of the page it came from. Select a value — a price, a quantity, a name — and the picture above it crops to exactly where that value was written.

Where the writing was not clear, Swipee asks in plain words: "We read this quantity as 70. Is that correct?" If it was, press Looks right. If it was not, press Fix here and type it.

A value that could not be read at all is left empty, with a note saying so. Swipee never fills in a price, a barcode or a quantity it could not read.

Sizes written under a product

A book that says

Coke
500ml   24   .65   1.00
1L      12   1.10  1.50

is read as Coke in two sizes, each with its own stock, cost and price. Swipee says so on the row — "are 500ml and 1L all sizes of Coke?" — because it worked that out from the layout of the page rather than from anything written.

If they belong together, press Looks right. If they do not, press Not the same product and they become separate items.

Nothing is added until you say so

Everything above happens in a draft. Your shop is unchanged until you press the button on the last step, and an import can be undone afterwards from Earlier imports.

Next steps

• Move your products into Swipee
• Variations and SKUs
• Track stock levels and low-stock alerts