One Product, Several Sizes: Pricing and Counting Pints, Quarts, and Half-Dozens on a Self-Serve Till

Blueberries come in a pint, a quart, and a flat. Eggs go out by the half-dozen and the dozen. Jam fills a 4 oz, an 8 oz, and a 16 oz jar. Bouquets are small or large. It's the same thing to your customer — they just want the big one or the little one.

On most small tills, that simple idea turns into three unrelated products. Three tiles that have nothing to do with each other, three names to keep spelled the same, and three stock counts you update by hand and pray stay honest. At a staffed counter you can paper over the mess. At a self-serve stand, where nobody is standing there to catch a mislabeled sale, the mess quietly becomes your end-of-day report.

There's a better way to model it, and it's worth understanding before you build your catalog: one thing the customer recognizes, several things they can actually buy.

What a "size" actually is

"Blueberries" is one thing your customer recognizes. Pint, Quart, and Flat are the things they buy — each with its own price, its own barcode, and its own stock.

TallyTill models exactly that. The product becomes a group tile — the thing with the name and the photo — and the sizes underneath it are what ring up. The tile itself is never sold: on your catalog list it reads "3 sizes," not "$0.00," so you can never accidentally sell a priceless placeholder, and a customer never taps a tile that charges nothing.

Adding a second size doesn't throw away the first

This is the fear that stops people: I've been selling "Blueberries" all season. It has a stock count and a sales history. If I turn it into sizes, do I lose all that?

No. When you add the first size to a plain product, the original row stays put — it keeps its id, its on-hand stock, its full movement ledger, and every sale line that ever pointed at it. It becomes the first size under a brand-new group tile. All you do is name what the product already is: the Portal asks "What size is it now?" — you type Pint — and then you add the new one, say Quart. Nothing is recounted. Nothing is orphaned. Your history follows the berries.

That matters because the alternative — deleting the old product and rebuilding three new ones — throws away exactly the stock count and sales record you spent a season building.

The one decision that trips everybody up: two ways a size counts stock

When you add a size, you tell the till how to count it. There are two honest answers, and the words on screen are plain:

Has its own count is the ordinary case. The pint and the quart are filled and stacked separately, so they're counted separately. Sell a pint, the pint number drops by one; the quart number doesn't move.

Takes from the shared count is the one people don't know they wanted. You have a single bin of berries. You don't want to track "pints" and "quarts" as separate inventory — you want to track berries, by the pound, and let every size draw the right amount. So you count the bin once, in pounds, and tell each size how much it takes: a pint takes 0.75 lb, a quart takes 1.5 lb. Sell a pint and three-quarters of a pound comes off the bin. Sell a quart and a pound and a half comes off. One number to keep honest instead of three.

One rule worth knowing up front: a size that takes from the shared count is sold as a single item, so it can't also be sold by the weighed amount at the till. If you want berries weighed loose on a scale, that's its own product — not a size drawing from the pool. The two models don't mix on one line, and the till will tell you so rather than silently ringing up a $0.00 line.

Selling a size by weight

A size doesn't have to be a fixed item. Any size can be sold by weight with its own per-pound (or per-kg, per-oz) price — a "5 lb bag" priced as a flat item, next to a "loose, by the pound" size on the same product, each priced its own way. The till asks for the weight and charges weight × rate, and if that size has its own count, it draws down by weight too.

For how the till rings any of this up without a label: a customer scans the size's barcode and that exact size rings up, or — for the no-barcode items a farm stand lives on — they snap a photo and the AI identifies the product, then choose the size. Each size carrying its own barcode is what lets a quick scan land on the right one instead of a generic "berries."

What quietly comes along with each size

This is the part cobbled-together "three separate products" setups get wrong, and it's where sizes earn their keep. When a size is created, everything that identifies the product comes down with it automatically — not just the name and picture:

• Age checks. Add a 1 L bottle as a size of a 21-and-over spirit and it inherits the ID prompt. Build it as a separate product by hand and it's one forgotten checkbox away from a till that never asks.
• Consignor / payout tags. If a product is tagged to a maker or a department so it lands in the right month-end total, every size keeps that tag — so a new jar size doesn't quietly drop out of someone's payout.
• Receipt and label printing. A size of an admission product still prints its wristband; a labeled item still prints its label.
• Per-sale caps. A "one seat only" limit stays a limit on every size, instead of silently becoming unlimited.
• Tax treatment. Food exemptions and per-product tax overrides carry across the sizes.

You don't have to remember any of it. That's the point — the hand-built version is a list of things you will eventually forget on one of them.

Why this is worth getting right at an unattended stand

When there's a cashier, a wrong size or a drifted count gets caught and fixed in the moment. When the stand runs itself, nothing gets caught — it just shows up later as a report you can't trust.

Modeling sizes properly keeps four things correct on their own, with no one watching the till:

• Names. Receipts and sale records read "Blueberries — Quart," composed for you, so your day's sales actually tell you which size moved — not just that "berries" sold.
• Counts. Each size's stock (or the one shared pool) moves by the exact amount of each sale, automatically.
• Reports. Sales break down by size, so you learn that quarts outsell pints two to one and pack accordingly.
• The catalog. One tile instead of three means a shorter, cleaner grid for the customer to tap through.

Setting it up

Sizes are managed in the Portal catalog — the cloud is the source of truth, and the change syncs down to every till automatically (there's no per-device product editing to keep in step). The flow:

1. Open the product in your catalog.
2. Choose "It comes in sizes."
3. Name the size it is now (Pint), and add the next one (Quart) with its price.
4. For each size, pick Not counted, Has its own count, or Takes from the shared count — and if it's shared, say how much it takes.
5. Save. The sizes appear on every till on the next sync.

Add as many sizes as the product honestly has. Sell a pint and a quart today; add the flat when the picking's good.

Try it on your own catalog

The Stand plan is free — $0 per seat, no credit card, no expiration — so you can turn a phone or tablet you already own into a self-serve till and model your real catalog, sizes and all, before you decide anything.

Create your free account and set up your first multi-size product in a few minutes. Price the pint, price the quart, point them both at one bin of berries, and watch the count come down right.