Thanks Jonathan for the big picture perspective. It's helped a lot in Salt Lake, we delivered 2427 refurbished bikes to our community last year from that location alone, out of 2837 donated.
Specifically, we've been using the
Walking Bird inventory control tag to good effect, but haven't been attaching it to the bike upon donation. Our kids bikes and kill bikes (around 1200 bikes last year) duck that system, once a bike is donated it is triaged, sorted to be killed by volunteers, tuned by more skilled volunteers, or fixed by paid mechanics. Only the bikes fixed by paid mechanics get a walking bird tag. At this point you can integrate the system into your POS, since each walking bird tag has a unique number. We use the tags to track the bike's progress from mechanic to sales floor to client/customer, keeping the tag on file after the bike has left the shop. So if a huffy comes in, gets two hours spent on it, new tires and tubes and a brake cable, then is given away a week later, the director of operations sees that bike coming and going. We haven't integrated the system into our POS yet, rather we just keep the tags, the director of operations goes through them to reconcile consumables inventory and log mechanic efficiency, and keeps the paper on file in case there's an issue with the bike down the road. We will integrate with our POS as soon as we spend the time stepping it up to a functional computer based, rather than partial paper, inventory. I'll report back then.