Flower shop inventory: what to record, how, and in which software

Flower shop inventory rests on four records: what came in on the supplier invoice, what was sold, what was written off, and how much money is in the till and owed by customers. Keep all four every day and by evening you know how many roses are left in the cold room, and why a full till does not match the bank balance. Let even one of them run from memory and the figures stop adding up within a week.

What flower shop inventory covers

Stock records for a flower shop are not bookkeeping. They are your own working records for decisions: what to order on Friday, what to put into bouquets today, which member of staff writes off twice as much as the others. Bookkeeping and tax are a separate matter, covered further down.

Five lines, and that is everything you need to record. The difficulty is not the number of records but making them agree with each other. Deliveries minus sales minus waste gives a stock figure you can check by counting the cold room.

Stock in stems and bunches

Roses arrive in bunches of 10 or 20, sometimes 25, depending on the grower. Spray chrysanthemums come by the stem, greenery in bunches or by weight. You sell by the stem and in bouquets. If one record holds an item in bunches and another in stems, stock goes wrong from the first delivery.

The rule is simple: every item has one unit, and that unit is the stem (or the spray). Break a bunch down when you book the delivery. Four bunches of 25 arrived, so you record 100 roses at the bunch price divided by 25. That makes bouquet costing and waste far easier to calculate.

The second point: the same rose comes in different lengths and from different growers, at different prices. A red rose at 50 cm and a red rose at 70 cm are two items, not one "red rose". Otherwise your cost price becomes an average, and the markup on the long rose is lower than you think. Wholesalers and the auction already list stem length on every lot, so carry it into your own records too.

The weekly count is what keeps flower shop inventory honest. Count your main items once a week, ideally the day before a delivery, when the cold room is emptiest. A difference of five roses is a reason to find out straight away, while staff still remember where they went. A month later nobody will.

Bouquets: recording recipes

The weakest point in almost any shop is bouquets. The florist makes a bouquet from 15 roses, 5 stems of eucalyptus, ribbon and wrap, and the till records one line. The money is there, but the roses are still on the stock list. A week later the records show 40 roses that are not in the cold room. It looks like theft, but it all went into bouquets.

The answer is the recipe. For standard display bouquets, set up a card: what goes in and how much. For designer bouquets, the florist notes the recipe at the sale. It takes a minute and settles half the arguments about missing stock.

An example with illustrative prices (use your own invoices):

Once you know the cost, it is easier to see whether your markup covers waste. How to build that in is explained in our article on flower markup, and the price of a specific bouquet in our guide on how to price a bouquet.

Waste: record it at once, with a reason

A flower that opened too far or snapped still cost money, even if nobody bought it. If waste is not recorded, it dissolves into the stock figures and looks like a shortage, and a shortage looks like a question for your staff.

Record each write-off on the same day with one of a few reasons: supplier defect, opened or wilted, broken during work, went into a discounted bouquet. Keep the list short on purpose: staff stop distinguishing between the items of a long one.

Say you bought €4,000 of flowers on Friday and by Tuesday €600 had gone in the bin. That is 15% of purchases. The number alone says little; the breakdown is what helps. If most of it is supplier defects, talk to the supplier. If it is "opened", you are buying too much per day. If it is "broken during work", look at the florist's routine or at the packaging. How to reduce each type of loss is covered in our article on flower waste.

Money: cash, card and customer accounts

The money side looks simplest and is where people get confused most often. At the end of the day three figures must agree: cash in the till, card and bank-transfer payments, and total sales in your records. Write down cash expenses (water, a taxi, cleaning supplies) immediately, with the receipt, or by evening they turn into "€20 missing".

Customer accounts get their own line. The office you supply with a weekly reception arrangement pays by monthly invoice. A corporate event order is paid afterwards. If these sums live in a member of staff's head, within six months some customer will owe you more than you thought. Keep a list for each regular account: what was delivered, what was paid, what is outstanding.

The till and your stock records are different things. In several European countries the cash register itself must meet national rules, so check yours with your accountant. The till records sales, while your stock records answer how much you earned and where the flowers went. A till system gives you part of the data, but deliveries, waste and bouquet recipes are usually not in it.

Flower shop inventory tools: notebook, spreadsheet or software

The choice depends less on how big you plan to grow and more on how many people make entries and where your stock comes from.

A paper book is an honest way to start if you work alone. Once a second person joins you at the counter, it becomes a source of arguments about who wrote what. A spreadsheet lasts longer, but usually breaks on bouquets and on two people trying to keep one sheet up to date.

Software for flower shop inventory pays for itself through less manual recounting rather than through a long feature list. How to choose between general systems, cloud florist software and a CRM, and what to ask before you buy, is covered in our guide to flower shop software.

If your products, prices and stock already live in an accounting or ERP system, you do not need a second database beside it. That is how the Petala CRM for flower wholesalers works. Products, prices and stock come from your own system via Excel/CSV or API, and the team sees purchases with supplier, invoice, delivery day and sum, stock by branch, write-offs, sales and cash in one section, and a profit and loss report. Any table exports to Excel. It does not replace your till, and web orders arrive to a manager in the CRM rather than being posted into your accounts automatically.

Bookkeeping and VAT records

Your stock records are for you; bookkeeping and tax returns are for the authorities. They overlap, with the same invoices and the same sales, but they answer different questions and follow different rules.

What you must keep depends on your country and on whether you trade as a sole trader or through a limited company; a limited company generally carries heavier bookkeeping duties. VAT is the part flower shops ask about most. The Netherlands applies its reduced 9% rate to flowers and plants, and Germany its reduced 7% rate to cut flowers and plants; elsewhere, check your national rate. Rules and thresholds change, so rely on your accountant or the national tax authority rather than an article. Structures and VAT are covered in our article on flower shop VAT.

How to keep the books without extra work:

1. Keep every supplier invoice in one folder or in your software: they support your costs and the VAT you reclaim.
2. Record waste with a date and a reason: it explains the gap between purchases and sales.
3. Keep business and personal spending on separate cards and accounts.
4. Once a month, reconcile till takings with what reached the bank.
5. Ask your accountant whether you need a stock count at the year end and how to value it.

Tidy working records make your accountant's job easier. If deliveries, sales and waste are already recorded, they only have to process them, not reconstruct them from receipts.

How to switch to a new inventory system without losses

When you move flower shop inventory to a new system, the switch fails not because of the software but on day one, when the old figures do not match the new ones. An order that works:

1. Pick a quiet week. Well away from Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and the December rush; for many shops that means midsummer.
2. Build the product list. Each item separately: type, variety, colour, length, unit. This takes longest, and nothing works without it.
3. Do an opening count. The evening before launch, count the cold room and the display and enter the figures as opening stock.
4. Run both for a week. Old method and new side by side. If stock agrees at the end of the week, drop the old one.
5. Teach staff three actions: a sale with the bouquet recipe, a write-off with a reason, and closing the day. The rest they will learn as they go.

Common mistakes when switching: one item called "rose" for all lengths, opening stock entered roughly, and not explaining to staff why waste must be recorded. The last one is the most expensive. If staff see a write-off as an admission of guilt, they do not record it, and the figures show missing stock again.