The moment you open a second place to sell from, one question starts following you around: do I still have any of those at the other spot? You counted the pint jars of honey this morning, but that count was for the home stand. The Saturday booth sold three. The pickup shed gave two away in CSA boxes. By Sunday your one number is wrong, and the only way to fix it is to drive over and look.
A single running total works for one location. It quietly breaks the week you add a second — because the same product now lives in two places at once, and a sale in one doesn't touch the other. This is the problem a per-location catalog solves: one product list, but a separate on-hand count for every place you sell from.
One catalog, counted per place
The mistake most small sellers make is duplicating the product. "Heirloom Tomatoes — Stand" and "Heirloom Tomatoes — Market" become two catalog entries, two prices to keep in sync, two barcodes, two things to edit when the price changes. Then a third shows up for the pickup shed and the whole list is a hall of mirrors.
TallyTill keeps the product singular and splits only the count. "Heirloom Tomatoes" is one entry — one price, one photo, one barcode — and it carries an on-hand number at each of your locations. A merchant with one spot has a single location called Main and never thinks about this. The moment you add Saturday Market or North Road Fridge, the same tomatoes simply gain a second and third count.
What a sale actually does
Set each till to the place it sells from — the booth tablet is the Saturday Market till, the fridge's tablet is the North Road till. From then on, every sale that till rings up draws down that location's count and no one else's. A shopper scans a barcode, or snaps a photo and the app identifies the item, the cart is built, payment is taken — and the tomatoes come off the market's shelf, not the home stand's.
That's the whole point of splitting the count: the number at each place moves on its own, in real time, as that place sells. You're no longer keeping a mental ledger of "sold at the booth, haven't subtracted yet." The subtraction already happened, at the right location, the second the sale closed.
Sales also decrement while a till is offline. If the market booth loses signal — and a field in July usually has none — the till keeps selling and keeps counting locally, then reconciles the movements to the cloud when it's back on a connection. The count catches up; it doesn't get lost.
The restock run, without the arithmetic
The real test of multi-location stock is the restock run, because that's where hand-kept numbers always drift. You load a crate of squash into the truck, drop ten at the market booth and the rest at the fridge, and now two counts are supposed to change in opposite directions.
Record it as a move between locations and both sides update at once — ten leave the home stand, ten arrive at the booth — and the move is written to the stock history with the date, the quantity, and who did it. Nothing is invented and nothing is double-counted. A week later, when the numbers look off, you can open the history and see every harvest, delivery, sale, count and move that touched that product, newest first.
Because harvests and deliveries land at a location with a lot label and a pack date, you also keep the thread for the questions that matter later: which batch of eggs went to which fridge, and when they were packed. That's the difference between "I think those are from Tuesday" and knowing.
Which place is about to run dry
The reason per-location counts are worth keeping is that they let the system watch the shelves for you. On supporting plans, TallyTill can send a daily low-stock email: one message that lists what's sold out or running low, at which location, so you plan the restock run before a customer finds an empty shelf instead of after.
Set a threshold per product — three jars of honey feels empty, but three pallets of firewood is a crisis — or let a single account-wide threshold stand in. A product at or below its line shows up on the list, tagged with the place it's low at. You stop discovering shortages by driving out to them. Whether the daily email is included on your plan is worth checking against the current plans and features.
Bundles and boxes across locations
If you sell a gift box, a variety pack, or a CSA add-on bundle, its "on-hand" isn't a number on a shelf — it's how many you could build from the components in stock. A six-jar sampler shows as however many complete samplers your current jars allow, and that buildable count falls as either the bundle or its parts sell. Across locations this matters: a bundle you assemble at the home stand draws from the components counted there, so the buildable number reflects the place you actually pack it.
What it won't do for you
Honest limits, because a tool that oversells itself costs you a wasted afternoon:
- It isn't a warehouse system. This is stock-by-place for a handful of selling spots — stands, booths, fridges, a pickup shed — not multi-echelon distribution with purchase orders and supplier lead times.
- The cloud is the source of truth. You manage the catalog, locations, and moves from the Portal; the tills sell and count against it. There's no editing the master product list from a stand's tablet — that's deliberate, so two people in two places can't fork your catalog.
- A count is only as good as the last count. Sales, moves, harvests and deliveries keep the number honest automatically, but if something walks off a shelf without a sale, only a physical count catches it. Multi-location tracking narrows where the shrink is; it doesn't see theft.
Start with Main, add the second place when it earns it
You don't set any of this up in advance. Run one location — Main — until the day a second selling spot is real. Then add it, set its till, and the same catalog you already built starts carrying a second count. Moving from one stand to several is the point at which a running total in your head stops working; it's also the point at which this starts paying for itself.
You can put a phone or tablet you already own at each spot and try it on the free plan — one catalog, real per-location counts — before you commit to a second location at all. Create a free account and set up your first location; add the next one the week you need it.