How do I ring up a thousand products without typing their names?

A hundred menu items you can find by name. Several thousand products, you cannot — typing stops being realistic long before a catalogue that size. So a barcode scan finds and rings up the item directly, and when a barcode won’t read, the same product comes up by keying its code in by hand instead of hunting down a list.

Repricing works the same way, in bulk. A CSV file updates prices or adds new products in one pass, which is what a supplier changing cost on forty lines at once actually requires; editing them one at a time is how the shelf ends up disagreeing with the till. A product that comes in several sizes or colours lives as one item with variants underneath it, so the catalogue doesn’t balloon into a separate line for every combination a customer might pick.

Counting what’s on the shelf is its own routine. A stock take records the physical count of each item against what the system expects and surfaces the gap, so shrinkage or a miscount gets caught instead of carried forward invisibly. A count that falls below its threshold can be turned into a purchase order on the spot, and a return handled at the till puts the stock back where it came from, so the count is right before the next take and not after it.

One smaller thing a busy morning teaches you: two customers who buy the identical basket in the same window are counted separately at the till but collated on the printed receipt, so the day doesn’t end in a stack of near-duplicate paper to sort by hand.