Tailor shop management software: what it should actually do

Take one garment, say a suit with a fitting, and walk it through the shop in your head. Someone takes the order. Someone cuts. Cloth leaves the shelf. A fitting gets booked. The customer pays part now and part later. Tailor shop management software earns its fee at those hand-offs, where a job moves from one person to the next. Everything else is decoration.

Here is that walk, step by step, with what matters at each point. If you are at the stage of comparing vendors, our buyer's guide has the questions to ask them. This post is about the job itself.

At the counter: the order

An order is rarely one item. A customer wants a suit and two shirts, and the shirts are needed first. If the software treats that as one line with one due date, you will be working around it from the first day.

What matters:

• Each garment in an order has its own due date and its own stage.
• The measurements are attached to the customer and the garment type, with a date on each set.
• Customer's own fabric is recorded as theirs, so it is not counted in your stock.
• The deposit and balance are visible to whoever hands the garment over.

Noise at this step: long customer profiles with fields nobody fills in. If the counter staff skip half of them in week one, they are no use to you.

Into the workshop: stages and people

This is where most shops lose track. The question you ask ten times a day is: where is it, and who has it?

Stages must match your shop. A bridal gown with three fittings and a shirt with none do not move the same way, and you should be able to add, rename and reorder stages yourself. Our post on tracking garment production goes into how to set those stages out.

Each stage of each job needs one named person. Two names means nobody is responsible. You also want more than one view of the same work: a board for the morning meeting, a list for searching, and a view of what is due today.

The person at the machine has to use it too. A screen that takes ten small taps at the bench will be ignored, and then your board is fiction by Wednesday. Big buttons and few steps count for more than a long feature list here.

On the shelf: materials

A tailor who runs out of lining on the day of a fitting has a stock problem that looks like a production problem. The software should show what a job needs before anyone cuts, record what was issued, and take back what was left over.

Separate two kinds of shop here. If you buy cloth for each order, a light record is enough. If you hold rolls, beads and trims, you need issue and return records, a warning when an item runs low, and a note of the dye lot. An unbroken record of movements tells you where the missing metres went.

Noise at this step: automatic forecasting for a shop that makes eight suits a month. You know when you are low.

In the fitting room: the calendar

Fittings are appointments linked to a job. A loose calendar misses that link. If a fitting is on Thursday, the workshop must have the garment ready by Wednesday. One reviewer of a tailoring system said this directly: "Appointments features would have helped in managing their orders better".

What matters is a clash check, and a fitting tied to both the customer and the open order. After each fitting, the changes should reach the person who will make them, in writing.

On the rack: finished stock

Ignore this section if you make to order alone. If you also make for your own rack, the software has to treat a batch differently from an order: plan it by size, split it if some pieces go elsewhere, and move finished pieces into stock. Stock should show by size, and by length if you sell that way.

A test: ask where the 8 size-M pieces from last week's batch are now. If the system cannot tell you whether they are in the workshop, the back room or on the rack, you will be walking to check.

At the till: selling and collecting money

A tailor's sale is not a supermarket sale. Payment arrives in parts, the goods may not exist yet, and a piece off the rack may need shortening. The software needs deposits, later payments and a clear balance. Our tailor shop POS checklist goes through this in detail.

Afterwards: cost and reports

Most reports go unread. Choose the few that lead to a decision:

• Cost per piece against selling price. This tells you which jobs pay. The sums are in our guide to calculating garment cost.
• Work due in the next week, by stage. This tells you whether to accept the next order.
• Balances still to collect. This is your own money.
• Wastage by reason. This points at training or a supplier.
• Daily cash closing. This catches a mistake while people still remember it.

A dashboard with twenty charts looks good in a demo. Ask yourself which chart would have changed something you did last week.

Sorting the must-have from the noise

Before you buy anything, run one real garment from last month through a trial, from order to handover. Note every point where you reached for paper.

That walk is how Tailoq was laid out: make for stock, make for a customer, and sell both, in one system. The full list of Tailoq features follows the same route as this post, and a demo shop lets you test it.