For a UK independent jeweller the realistic shortlist is Clarity & Success (which absorbed Bransom in 2019) and Jewel-Master, the two established UK-built systems, plus Milleso, our own product, built around the three VAT regimes a jeweller actually runs. The Edge and Jewel360 are the best-known US systems and handle repairs and serialised stock well, but neither publishes a word about VAT, and The Edge is a Windows install with a one-off licence. Lightspeed, Shopify POS and Square are good generic tills with published GBP pricing and no jewellery logic. The table below is the whole comparison in one place.

The comparison table

All prices as of August 2026, taken from the vendor's own page where one exists. "Not published" means we could not find a price anywhere on the vendor's site and are not repeating third-party guesses.

System Built where Hosting Published UK price Margin scheme Serialised one-off stock Repairs / customer property Xero / Sage Best for
Clarity & Success (Evolution) UK (Stafford) and Germany; part of the SelectLine Group Not stated on site Not published; monthly subscription, Standard edition launched Nov 2024 Yes - buy-in module for pre-owned and scrap with margin scheme records (July 2024) Yes Yes (module; Repair app) Not stated on site Established UK multi-store jewellers and former Bransom users
Jewel-Master UK (Basingstoke) Cloud Not published; fixed monthly fee Not mentioned on site Yes Yes - included with EPOS, SMS and email, photos, outworker stages QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, MYOB links UK single and multi-site jewellers who want cloud and a repairs-first workflow
The Edge (Abbott Jewelry Systems) USA On-premise Windows, own server Not on vendor site; directories list a one-off licence from US$3,500 No (US sales tax model) Yes Yes - barcoded envelopes, text and email notifications QuickBooks only US stores; UK only if you accept Windows hardware, dollar pricing and no VAT model
Jewel360 USA (Rain Retail Software, Utah) Cloud US$199/month Startup; Core and Plus on request; US$750 setup fee rebated at go-live No Yes (Core plan and up) Yes (Core plan and up) QuickBooks (Plus plan) US independents wanting cloud and Shopify sync
Lightspeed Retail (X-Series) Canada Cloud £75 / £149 / £189 a month (Basic / Core / Plus) No Serial numbers against a SKU Basic services module; no customer-property ledger Xero (native) Multi-site retail with a web shop; not jewellery-specific
Shopify POS Canada Cloud £25 / £65 / £344 a month; POS Pro £69 a month per location; in-person card 1.7% to 1.5% No No (apps add serial tags) No Xero via third-party app Jewellers whose online shop is the business and the counter is secondary
RAIN POS USA (same company as Jewel360) Cloud Not published No Not stated Yes - repairs and custom work with texts QuickBooks Online US independents; UK not addressed
Jewelry Shopkeeper (Compulink) USA Windows, one-off licence US$1,995 Core package; US$3,195 to US$3,995 Complete; repair tracking US$395 and envelope printing US$195 as modules No Yes Yes QuickBooks (US$295 module) US single-store owners who want to buy once; UK not addressed
Milleso (our product - weigh this row accordingly) UK Cloud £99 a month Counter, £249 a month Trade, ex VAT; one month free; migration done for you Yes - margin, standard and reverse charge decided at intake, three regimes in one sale Yes - serialised with all-in cost Yes - workshop with customer property held separately from stock Xero and Sage export UK jewellers who also buy gold, take part-exchange or run repairs

What a UK jeweller needs that a US roundup does not check

Every roundup you will find for "jewelry store software" scores repairs, appraisals, serialised inventory and QuickBooks. Those matter. But a UK shop has four further tests that decide whether the software is usable at the VAT return.

The margin scheme. A second-hand ring bought from the public and sold on is taxed on the margin, not the price, under VAT Notice 718. Paragraph 5.3 says the sales invoice must not show VAT separately, and paragraph 5.2 requires a stock book with twelve fields per item. A till that prints "VAT £X" on a margin scheme receipt has just invalidated your scheme treatment for that sale. Of the nine systems above, only Clarity & Success, Jewel-Master (see the unverified list) and Milleso operate in the country where this rule exists.

Reverse charge on scrap gold. If you sell accumulated scrap to a refiner at metal value, you must not charge VAT; the buyer accounts for it under section 11 of VAT Notice 701/21. No generic till knows this. Our piece on VAT on scrap gold has the invoice wording.

Part-exchange. Notice 718 paragraph 13.6 requires the part-exchange value to go into your stock book as the purchase price of the piece taken in, unaltered, while the full selling price of the piece going out includes that value. A till that treats part-exchange as a discount gets both numbers wrong.

Repairs as customer property. A repair job is not stock. It is someone else's ring sitting in your safe, and it needs its own count for insurance, which your jewellers block may not cover as you assume. Systems built around SKU and quantity cannot hold this distinction; they either book the ring into stock (wrong for VAT and insurance) or leave it in a paper envelope.

Then the practical column: UK support hours and GBP pricing. Only the UK-built rows and Milleso address both.

Which is best for a UK jeweller with repairs and a second-hand counter?

Clarity & Success or Milleso, depending on size and appetite. Clarity's Evolution is the incumbent in UK multi-store jewellery and its July 2024 buy-in module explicitly handles pre-owned and scrap purchases with margin scheme records. Its managing director change (Mike Oldroyd replacing the retiring Karen Russell from 3 August 2026, per Retail Jeweller and Jewellery Focus) was covered by the UK trade press, which tells you where its customers are. The cost is opacity: no published price and a hosting model not stated on the site.

Jewel-Master is the other UK-built choice and arguably the stronger repairs workflow for a single shop: the repairs module comes with the EPOS, prints receipts with barcodes, attaches photos as pieces arrive and leave, and supports any number of status stages between "new" and "complete". Its site links accounts to QuickBooks, Xero, Sage and MYOB and runs a Shopify and WooCommerce web store. What its site does not say is anything about the margin scheme, which is the one thing we would ask on the demo.

Which is best for a jeweller whose business is mostly online?

Shopify POS. At £25 a month on Basic plus £69 a month per location for POS Pro, with in-person card rates from 1.7% down to 1.5% on Advanced, it is the cheapest credible counter in the table and its web shop is the best of the group. The trade-offs are structural. Shopify has no serialised stock - every piece is a SKU with a quantity, and serial tracking comes from third-party apps. There is no repairs module. Deposits and partial payments on orders are restricted to Shopify Plus, from £1,800 a month, so a layaway sale on a £3,000 ring needs a workaround or an app. And it has no concept of the margin scheme; you would set the item to no VAT and compute the margin VAT outside the till.

Lightspeed Retail X-Series is the step up if you want multi-site retail with a proper layby feature and serial numbers, and it has a native Xero integration. It is priced in GBP at £75, £149 and £189 a month on its UK page, with the caveat on the same page that "prices can vary" by industry, and its card rates are quoted individually rather than published. Its services module tracks basic repairs but was not designed around jewellery jobs.

Which US jewellery system travels best to the UK?

Jewel360, if any. It is cloud-hosted, so there is no Windows server to buy, and it publishes a US$199 a month entry price with serialised inventory, repairs, appraisals, memo and consignment arriving on the Core plan. It is operated by Rain Retail Software in Provo, Utah - the same company as RAIN POS - and its own site says 500+ jewellers "nationwide", which is the US. We found no published statement on UK customers, GBP billing, VAT or UK support hours.

The Edge is the better-known name, with "4,000+ active stores" and a 2002 launch date on its site, and its repairs module (barcoded envelopes, automatic text and email when a job is finished, Geller's Blue Book pricing) is mature. But it is installed software: a Windows workstation and a server with at least 16GB of RAM and 500GB of disk, per its own requirements page. Its pricing page is a calculator that ends in a quote; the one-off licence figures of US$3,500 (Software Advice, Capterra) and US$4,600 for the Basic single-store package (G2) come from directories, not from The Edge. Its accounting link is QuickBooks. Nothing on its site mentions VAT. We cover the three US systems in more depth in The Edge vs Jewel360 vs Lightspeed for UK jewellers.

RAIN POS and Jewelry Shopkeeper are in the table because US roundups list them. RAIN publishes no price. Jewelry Shopkeeper publishes every module price in dollars, one-off, and its pricing page still lists Windows XP, Vista and 7 as supported platforms.

Where does Milleso fit, and where does it not?

Milleso is our product, so read this section as a vendor talking. It is built for the UK: the VAT treatment - margin, standard-rated or reverse charge - is decided when a piece is taken in, not at the return, and a single sale can carry all three. Stock is serialised with the all-in cost on each piece. The workshop holds customer property separately from stock. There is a gold desk that prices by weight, fineness and spot and marks the lot melt or keep. Consignment and memo carry consignor payouts. Channels are Chrono24, eBay, Shopify and WooCommerce, with listings paused when a piece leaves the building. The till does part-exchange. Exports go to Xero and Sage. Counter is £99 a month and Trade £249 a month, both ex VAT, with one month free and migration done for you.

Where it does not fit: there is no US tax model, no multi-store yet, no built-in card terminal beyond the Dojo integration, and no furniture or vendor-mall consignment. If you run three branches, Clarity is the safer call today.

How to run the demo

Take the same five transactions to every vendor and watch them done live: a 9ct bracelet bought from the public for £180 cash and booked to the margin scheme, with the stock book entry printed; the same bracelet sold for £420 against a £100 part-exchange, with a receipt that carries no VAT line and a stock book entry for the incoming ring at £100; a customer's eternity ring taken in for a claw retip, moved through three stages and shown on the customer-property count; 38 g of mixed scrap weighed in, split melt and keep, and invoiced to a refiner with the reverse charge wording; and the month exported to Xero or Sage. A vendor who can do all five in 30 minutes is on the list. Anything that needs "a workaround" on the first, second or fourth was not built for the UK, whatever the accent on the call.

What we could not verify

  • Clarity & Success pricing and hosting. No price is published for Evolution or the Standard edition; the site does not say whether Evolution is cloud or on-premise. Ask for the subscription, the setup fee and the hosting model in writing.
  • Clarity & Success accounting exports. Xero or Sage links are not listed on the pages we read. Confirm on the demo.
  • Jewel-Master margin scheme handling. Its site does not mention the scheme. Its repairs, accounts and web store pages are explicit, so this may be an omission of copy rather than of function.
  • The Edge licence price. US$3,500 to US$4,600 comes from software directories; The Edge itself only quotes through a calculator. Annual support renewal costs are not published anywhere we found.
  • Jewel360 Core and Plus prices, and any UK availability. Both on request.
  • Lightspeed UK card rates. Quoted individually, not published.
  • RAIN POS pricing. Not published.

Sources

This is general information, not a recommendation to buy any product, and not tax advice. Vendor pricing and features change without notice; every figure above was checked against the linked page in August 2026 and should be re-checked before you sign. Milleso is our product and appears in the table with that disclosure. Take VAT questions to your accountant.