A spreadsheet is a perfectly lawful jewellery stock list, and for a new business with under a few hundred pieces it is the right tool. It needs one row per piece, never one row per product line, and about 25 columns: a sequential stock number, the purchase and sale fields HM Revenue & Customs requires for the VAT margin scheme, metal, fineness and gross weight, stone details, location, status and the sales channel. It stops working at the point where two people edit it, where stock is listed online, or where a piece can be in the shop, in the workshop, on approval and sold within the same week - which for most independents is somewhere between 300 and 500 live pieces.
This article sets out the columns, the reasons spreadsheets fail in this trade specifically, and the test for when to move.
Spreadsheet, database or jewellery system?
| Option | Cost (Aug 2026) | Serialised one-off pieces | Margin scheme stock book | Metal weight and fineness | Repairs and customer property | Online channels | Xero/Sage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Excel or Google Sheets | Google Sheets free; Microsoft 365 Business Basic £5.40/user/month (web Excel), Business Standard £18.10/user/month (desktop Excel), ex VAT | Yes if you keep one row per piece | Yes if you add the 12 columns and never re-sort | Yes, as columns | A second sheet, by hand | Copy and paste listings | CSV import, by hand |
| Airtable or similar database | Free tier; Team $20/user/month billed annually | Yes | Yes, with discipline | Yes | Linked table | Via third-party connectors | CSV |
| Generic retail POS (Shopify POS, Square, Lightspeed) | Square free plan plus 1.75% per in-person card payment; Shopify from £25/month; Lightspeed on quote; see our POS comparison | Weak - built for SKU and quantity | No margin scheme invoice wording or VAT-on-margin | Custom fields at best | No | Native | Xero apps |
| Jewellery-specific system (Clarity & Success, Jewel-Master, The Edge, Jewel360) | Mostly unpublished; Jewel360 from $199/month; see the UK comparison | Yes | UK vendors yes; US vendors do not address it | Yes | Yes | Varies | UK vendors yes |
| Milleso | Our product, so weigh this row accordingly. Counter £99/month, Trade £249/month ex VAT, one month free, migration from your spreadsheet done for you | Yes, every piece serialised with its all-in cost | Yes - VAT treatment decided at intake, stock book maintained automatically | Yes, with a gold desk for scrap | Yes, customer property kept separate from stock | Chrono24, eBay, Shopify, WooCommerce; listings pause when a piece leaves the building | Yes |
The spreadsheet row is not a joke. Until the failure modes below start costing you money, the sheet is cheaper, faster to change and entirely acceptable to HMRC.
What columns does a jewellery stock list need?
Start with the twelve HMRC requires if you sell second-hand goods under the margin scheme. They are set out at paragraph 5.2 of VAT Notice 718 and covered in detail in our stock book article. Then add what the trade needs. The template below is what we would build in a blank workbook.
Identity and purchase
| Column | Why |
|---|---|
| Stock number | Sequential, never reused, never re-sorted. The spine of the margin scheme record. |
| Date of purchase | Margin scheme field |
| Purchase invoice number | Margin scheme field. For a private purchase you write the invoice and the seller signs it |
| Seller name and address | Margin scheme field; also your AML record for a buy-in |
| Purchase price | Margin scheme field. What you paid the seller - nothing else goes in this cell |
| VAT treatment at purchase | Margin scheme, standard-rated with VAT invoice, reverse charge (scrap gold from a VAT-registered trader), or bought from the public. This decides how the sale is taxed later |
| Description | Enough to identify the piece on its own |
| Category | Ring, chain, bracelet, earrings, watch, loose stone, scrap |
Metal and stones
| Column | Why |
|---|---|
| Metal | Gold, silver, platinum, palladium, mixed, base |
| Fineness | Parts per thousand as hallmarked: gold 375, 585, 750, 916, 990, 999; silver 800, 925, 958, 999; platinum 850, 900, 950, 999; palladium 500, 950, 999 |
| Hallmarked (Y/N) and assay office | Below the exemption weights (gold 1g, silver 7.78g, platinum 0.5g, palladium 1g) a piece may lawfully be unhallmarked; above them you cannot describe it as gold or silver without a mark unless it is pre-1950 and you can prove it |
| Gross weight (g) | Metal value at a glance, insurance, and the starting point for a scrap decision. Our scrap gold calculator does weight x fineness x spot |
| Stone type, carat weight, colour/clarity, certificate number | What a valuer, an insurer or a buyer asks first |
| Size or length | Ring size, chain length |
| Serial number | Watches and branded pieces; what the police and the Watch Register ask for |
Where it is and what happened to it
| Column | Why |
|---|---|
| Location | Window, tray number, safe, workshop, with a valuer, on memo to another dealer, out on approval |
| Status | In stock, reserved, in workshop, on memo, sold, scrapped, returned to customer |
| Retail price | And the date you last changed it |
| Costs after purchase | Polishing, sizing, a new clasp, a valuation. Kept in a separate column because Notice 718 says they must not be added to the purchase price for the margin |
| Channel listed on | Shop, website, eBay, Etsy, Chrono24 - with the listing reference |
| Photograph reference | Filename or link |
Sale
| Column | Why |
|---|---|
| Date of sale | Margin scheme field |
| Sales invoice number | Margin scheme field, cross-referenced to the stock number |
| Buyer name | Margin scheme field |
| Selling price or method of disposal | Margin scheme field. "Scrapped", "broken for stones" and "returned" are disposals too |
| Margin and VAT due | Margin scheme fields: selling price minus purchase price, and one sixth of that |
| Channel sold on and fees | So that the all-in return per piece is visible |
That is 27 columns. It looks like a lot and it fills in quickly, because most of it is known the moment the piece arrives. The discipline is to fill it in then, not at the VAT quarter.
Why do jewellery spreadsheets break?
Every trade's spreadsheet breaks eventually. Jewellery has five failure modes of its own.
One row per piece, not per SKU. A ring is not a product with a quantity of 12. It is a piece with a cost, a weight and a history. The moment someone adds a "Qty" column and starts decrementing it, the margin scheme record is gone - HMRC wants the purchase price of the specific item sold, and a quantity column cannot tell you which one left. Keep it serialised even when you have six identical silver bangles from the same supplier: six rows, six stock numbers.
Re-sorting destroys the sequence. The stock numbers must run in numerical order. A sheet sorted by brand for the window display, or by date for the accountant, and then saved, is a stock book an inspector cannot follow. Sort a copy, never the master.
Silent edits. A cost price changed after the sale, to improve the margin or by accident, leaves no trace. HMRC does not require an audit trail, but a record that cannot show what changed and when is weak evidence, and VAT on the full selling price is the penalty for a stock book the inspector cannot reconcile.
Customer property in the stock sheet. A repair or valuation item entered as stock to "keep track of it" inflates your stock figure, confuses the insurer's stock declaration and, in the worst case, gets sold. Customer goods live on a separate sheet with a job number, an intake date, a description, the agreed work and the agreed price. They are insured differently too.
The listing that is still live. A piece on the website and in the window is one piece. Sell it in the shop on Saturday and the Etsy listing is still up on Sunday. The spreadsheet cannot pause a listing, so you do it by hand, and the one you forget is the one that sells twice.
Then the ordinary failures: two people with two copies; the formula someone overwrote in cell AB417; the file that was on the laptop that was stolen with the stock; no photographs attached; the backup that was last taken before Christmas.
When should a jeweller move from a spreadsheet to software?
Not at a particular turnover. The signal is one of these:
- Two people enter stock. Shared spreadsheets do not fail loudly. They fail in small contradictions you find at stocktake.
- You sell on a second channel. Once stock is listed on a website or marketplace as well as in the shop, stock sync is a job someone has to do every day, and software does it.
- You take customer property. Repairs, valuations and approvals need a job record with a status, not a row on a stock sheet.
- You buy from the public. Buy-ins bring the margin scheme, the AML record and, for scrap, the reverse charge. Deciding VAT treatment at intake is the whole game, and a spreadsheet will not ask.
- The VAT quarter takes more than a morning. That is the sheet telling you.
Between 300 and 500 live pieces most shops hit at least two of those. Below that, the £5 to £18 a month for Excel is hard to beat.
How do you move without losing the history?
The six-year retention rule on margin scheme records means the spreadsheet does not get deleted; it gets frozen. Export it, date the file, keep it. Then import the live pieces into whatever you move to, with the stock number preserved - a new system that renumbers your stock breaks the chain from old invoices to old margins. Ask any vendor how they handle imported stock numbers before you sign. Most serious systems, including ours, will do the migration for you from the sheet you already have.
What we could not verify
- A typical piece count at which independents switch. The 300 to 500 figure is our experience from migrations, not a published survey.
- Airtable record limits per base on each plan. The pricing page lists seat prices but the limits were not visible when we checked.
- Current prices for Clarity & Success, Jewel-Master and The Edge. Not published; see the UK comparison for what is known.
Sources
- The Margin and Global Accounting Scheme (VAT Notice 718) - GOV.UK, paragraph 5.2 for the stock book fields
- Hallmarking - Business Companion - exemption weights and the dealer's notice
- UK hallmarks - Assay Office London - fineness standards
- Hallmarking guidance notes (November 2022) - Assay Office Birmingham, pre-1950 exemption and full fineness tables
- Compare Microsoft 365 business plans - UK pricing
- Airtable pricing
- Square UK pricing and Shopify UK pricing
This is general information, not tax or legal advice. The margin scheme record-keeping rules are HMRC's, not ours; read Notice 718 and confirm your own stock book format with your accountant.
Milleso is built around the row-per-piece idea above: every piece is serialised with its all-in cost, the VAT treatment is decided at intake, customer property sits outside stock, and a listing on Chrono24, eBay, Shopify or WooCommerce pauses the moment the piece leaves the building. We migrate from the spreadsheet you already have.