The $400,000 spreadsheet
Memo is the quietest risk in your store: other people's stones, tracked in a tab called FINAL-v3. Here's the discipline that keeps consignment from becoming a write-off.
The Gemercel team
Diamonds, manufacturing, and the system behind the counter
In this note
Ask a jeweler what keeps them up at night and you’ll hear about slow weekends, insurance premiums, maybe the mall. Ask their accountant and you’ll get a different answer: memo.
Consigned inventory is the trade’s superpower — you stock a six-figure case with other people’s stones and pay only when they sell. It’s also the only part of your balance sheet that lives in a spreadsheet, moves by handshake, and belongs to someone who will absolutely ask for it back.
Where memo goes wrong
Nobody loses a memo stone in one dramatic moment. It leaks in small, reasonable steps:
- A stone goes to a show in a partner’s case — recorded on a sticky note, transcribed “later.”
- A customer takes a piece on approval over a long weekend. The spreadsheet says in case.
- A return goes back to the dealer, but the credit memo never gets matched. Six months later you’re arguing about a stone neither of you can place.
- A memo sells on a busy Saturday — and the sale posts, but the consignor payable doesn’t. Now your margin looks great and your books are wrong.
Each miss costs nothing that day. The audit — from the dealer, from your insurer, from the IRS — happens years later, all at once.
The discipline that works
- Every movement gets a signature. In, out, show-transfer, approval, return. If a stone changes hands without a recorded hand-off, the system failed — not the person.
- Memo lives in inventory, not beside it. A memo stone should show in your case counts, your search, your website — flagged as consigned, with its return date attached.
- Aging is reviewed weekly. A stone out 60 days is a conversation. A stone out 180 days is a problem someone should have had 120 days ago.
- The sale posts the payable. The moment a memo piece sells, the amount you owe the consignor should exist in your books — automatically, not at month-end.
This is, unsurprisingly, how Gemercel treats memo: consignment is a first-class inventory state with signed movements, aging views, and ledger postings that write themselves. If your memo book is a spreadsheet, put your store on the list — we’ll show you what it looks like as a system.