How to Order Games (Tradecraft)

This week I'm handing off the ordering process to my manager for the next three months. I'll be on vacation in Central America for seven weeks, so this includes a couple weeks of practice and a week after I get back. If you're trying to hand off this process to someone, this might be useful. It could also be useful if you're new to ordering. Trips like this are an excellent opportunity to check your policies and procedures. Last time I was gone for a month, it took me about four hours to get the store back up to speed when I returned. That's what I want to see.

In the beginning, there were pre-orders. These have been placed in the past and will arrive throughout this period on a schedule of their choosing. I don't track them because they're unpredictable and our revenue levels can easily absorb them. My store pre orders absolutely everything and nothing is ordered last minute other than special orders and the Games Workshop weekly surprises. I don't read dailies. Although I'm handing off ordering, a critical part of this process is buying of new goods, and that's not getting handed off. So really I'm handing off restock ordering and purchase budget management.

My primary distributor is ACD and I get a full list of all pre orders every Saturday morning.
I have an almost equal amount of work to with Alliance, especially for Asmodee.

If I had no budget controls, there would be around $10,000 of stock that could be ordered at the moment. This is accomplished by generating purchase orders from our point of sale machine. To keep on budget, we use Open to Buy. You can download a sample Open to Buy spreadsheet here.

Open to Buy is how we know how much we can spend. Cost of goods are added, product purchases subtracted, and the total subtracted from the available balance, leaving a balance hopefully near zero. I'm currently over budget by almost $4,000, so there's no spending right now. Or is there?

Open to Buy with a negative starting balance

Pre orders will show up regardless of budget and although we can vaguely plan for the big ones, the small ones hit us by surprise and we tend to adjust purchasing after the fact. It's alright to go over budget, but it's not alright to keep buying once you're there. I do have exceptions though. I don't run the kind of store that doesn't have product on the shelves when Magic is released, so some categories get to exceed the budget.

These are my Top of Mind departments. It's alright to top off these departments even when over budget. They include the top performer in each department:

• Dungeons & Dragons
• Warhammer 40K (especially Space Marines)
• Chessex dice
• Magic: The Gathering
• Asmodee Family

I would like not to be out of any of these products we've determined to be worthy of carrying, regardless of budget. Most of them are also exempt from strict inventory metrics. Chessex is a "product pyramid" where we don't perform metrics, although Asmodee regularly gets looked at since the line is so vast. 

A long term buyer would be required to do inventory analysis on their potential purchasing to see what to continue ordering and what to drop. I would like to say we're training for that this week, but we're going to focus on budget for that filtering mechanism for now. Long term inventory analysis would be critical for success.

The next step is communication. All my sales reps need to understand that from this point forward, my manager is buying until further notice. Email communication goes to and from them and they have permission to buy. The manager also needs to ensure they have access to all the various web portals for orders, including logins and passwords.

Ordering schedule with notes

From here it's a matter of keeping on schedule, knowing when to order. Pre-orders will auto ship, if they hit enough freight, but restocks need to be manually placed, budget permitting, Top of Mind overriding. My schedule is particular to our circumstances with warehouses being next day ship and Games Workshop slapping penalties for more than one order a week. GW is by far the most painful to manage here and I'm often scrambling to make sure I have all the new releases. They could really use a pre order mechanism.

At this point I'll be out of the ordering loop, focusing instead on daily receipt totals I receive from staff. My job is now finance and continuing to place pre orders. My primary job is to make sure we don't run out of cash, but being out of the country, I have limits on what's possible, especially with new online banking which locks down my bills a week in advance. Ideally I would have checks ready from backup accounts, a big cash cushion, or overdraft protection on my account.

The last bit of this puzzle, for trips over my distributor terms (30 days) is a Google Sheets document with the bills. If I were going for a couple weeks, I could just pay my bills when I returned, but I'll exceed my store terms, along with various credit cards and utilities that often give me 2-3 weeks to pay.

My manager enters each bill into this sheet so I can use online banking to schedule payments. My biggest problem with this from my last trip was enjoying myself and forgetting to pay the bills. I woke up one morning and realized a bunch of stuff was due and just missed having the electricity cut off. Not for the first time, the weakest link in my system was me.