VB stock control program advice

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mb82

225 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 16

#173656 31-May-2015 23:03

So I am planning to make a program using visual basic. This will take a little time as visual basic and programming is new to me.

The requirement I have is for a small business stock control program. I have demo'd various off the shelf products but am not to keen on paying $60+ per month for software and the free software I have tried was not really suitable. Also it seems like a good reason to try creating one myself and also means it can be customized in the future if needed.

Basically wanting to create a program with the following features:

*Add stock items, with date received into stock and value.

*Display all items in stock including name, category, quantity, value and a total value of all stock at the bottom

*Sell / remove items from stock in a point of sale type of way which shows the total cost of goods removed in the transaction with a reference number. Also need display of transaction history.

*When items are sold / removed from stock it must be done in the way of First in First out. Meaning if one key board model abc1 is purchased in January for $40 and another keyboard the same model is purchased in February for $20, then one key board of this model is sold in March the unit of keyboard model abc1 removed from stock first must be the one purchased in January for $40, not the one purchased in February for $20

*Needs some kind of manual override for the first in first out incase a stock item is damaged and cannot be sold. Maybe simply a delete of said stock unit. So I need to be able to click on a product and view the received date (with manual date edit) and value of each unit on hand for that product.

Does this sound like a relatively simple and do-able project to use visual basic for?

elpenguino

3437 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 2732

#1318088 5-Jun-2015 16:59

yes and no.
sounds like everything you want to do, you could do inside Microsoft access with minimal coding. Not sure if you want to develop in VB6 or VB.net, Access uses VBA internally. which is very similar to VB6.

Your challenge will be to make it robust to cover all the usage scenarios - because people other than the developer will click in 'strange' places, in strange orders and enter unexpected data in boxes.

Your app sounds a lot like putting a front end on a database which is 'reasonably' easy to do - the database gives you a lot of the functionality you need without you having to re-invent it.
Access has pre-rolled functions for things like deleting an item, adding an item and so on.

But you didn't tell us if you're using PC / Windows or anything.

Cheers,

Chris

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

ObidiahSlope

260 posts

Ultimate Geek
+1 received by user: 66

#1318112 5-Jun-2015 18:00

Microsoft Access the database distributed with Office Professional, has an example database called Northwind.

I recomend you have a look to see if it can be adapted to your needs.

Obsequious hypocrite

Alagalac

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1318324 6-Jun-2015 16:27

You can download Visual Studio from Mircosoft for free. It'll let you develop with either VB.net or C#. It'll include Entity Framework which you could use for the database access, although there can be a bit of a learning curve.

mdf

3531 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 1476

Trusted

#1318403 6-Jun-2015 18:57

How are you actually selling the stuff? Online? In-store? Pop up store? Trademe? Are these already in place, or are you setting up a brand new business?

And what is the volume of the stuff you are selling?

Access will do a lot of the stuff you are talking about relatively easily, but automatically integrating it with your sales channels will be pretty hard. You're therefore left with manual stock control. This is fine if it's relatively low volume business and you (or someone equally as knowledgeable about the inventory management system as you) is keeping an eye on things, but will quickly go to pot if you're selling a lot of stuff quickly or via shop monkeys/retail sales assistants.

I've done quite a bit of work in SME stock and inventory management. Separately, I'm starting to learn to code in .NET (this is more a hobby I'm doing because I'm interested). In my estimation, you'd need to be pretty dedicated to combine the two to produce a useable product from scratch in any reasonable amount of time. The off the shelf ones/SaaS ones have some pretty nifty features that you'd be hard pressed to (re)invent yourself. You'd also probably need to throw some SQL into the mix to really get it right.