Loading event merchandise before the gates open
How an organiser sets up event T-shirts, caps and posters as products, with prices, VAT and opening stock right first time, before the tills open.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Events businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
The tour merchandise arrives two days before the show: boxes of T-shirts in two colours and five sizes, caps, tote bags, a limited-run poster and a pile of wristbands nobody ordered. By the time the gates open, every one of those items has to be in the till with the right price, or the merch tent spends the first hour writing sales on a notepad.
Setting up merchandise is mostly typing, but a few decisions made while typing are hard to undo later. This article covers those decisions, in the order you meet them.
Products live in the Item Master
Products are created in the Item Master, under the Accounting menu. It lists and creates products on the server with a SKU, a name, a category, a selling price, a cost price, an opening quantity and a VAT treatment. You need the Point of Sale, Warehousing or Wholesale add-on to use it.
Give every product a category such as "Tour merch" or "Festival 2026 merch". It makes the list easier to read when you have several events' worth of stock, and it helps whoever reviews sales later separate one event's merchandise from another's.
Sizes and colours as products of their own
The Item Master creates one product per record, so a black T-shirt in medium and a black T-shirt in large are two products, each with its own SKU and its own quantity. That is more typing, but it is also what lets you see after the show that the large black shirts sold out by nine while the small white ones barely moved.
A SKU pattern that people can read helps cashiers who search by code:
| Item | SKU |
|---|---|
| Tour T-shirt, black, medium | TEE-BLK-M |
| Tour T-shirt, black, large | TEE-BLK-L |
| Tour T-shirt, white, small | TEE-WHT-S |
| Cap, one size | CAP-OS |
| Poster, limited run | PST-LTD |
Investopedia's guide to stock-keeping units explains how retailers build SKUs to track stock levels and sales and how SKUs differ from the barcodes printed on packaging. That difference matters here: no screen lets you record a product's barcode, so a scanner at the till finds a product only when the scanned code matches its SKU. If you want to scan the supplier's barcodes, type the barcode number in as the SKU. If you would rather use readable SKUs, cashiers will search instead of scanning.
Prices and VAT are fixed once created
This is the decision to slow down for. No screen lets a business change a product's price, cost or VAT treatment after creating it, or deactivate it. A typo in the selling price stays in the till.
So, before you save each product:
- Selling price. Check it against the price list the artist's management or your own team signed off, including whether shelf prices include VAT.
- Cost price. Use what the merchandise actually cost you per unit. Every till sale posts cost of sales against inventory at the product's cost price, so a wrong cost makes the merch tent look more or less profitable than it was.
- VAT treatment. Agree the treatment of each item with your accountant before you type it in, especially anything sold as a bundle.
If a mistake does slip through, create a corrected product with a new SKU, tell every cashier to ignore the old one, and make sure the old product's stock is moved or counted to nothing so it cannot be sold by accident.
Opening quantities at the right location
Each till sale takes stock off at the location where that till was opened. With the Warehousing add-on, your stock locations, such as a store, a van and the venue itself, are kept on the server with the quantity on hand at each. The quantity that matters on the night is the one at the venue.
After saving products, check where their opening quantities sit. If the stock is at your store, move it to the venue location with a transfer, which goes from draft to dispatched to received. If you counted the boxes on site, a stock count at the venue location sets its quantity to what you counted.
Remember that opening quantities and transfers do not post to the general ledger. The value of the merchandise you bought belongs in the books through its supplier bill, and your accountant should know that the stock screens and the inventory account will not move together until you sell.
A dry run before doors open
An hour before the gates open, run through the till as the cashiers will:
- Open the merch till at the venue location, with its float.
- Ring up one of each product, by search and, if you use one, by scanner.
- Check the total and the receipt. The receipt is a PDF made from the posted sale, showing every payment and the VAT by rate.
- Have a supervisor or manager void the test sale. A whole sale can be voided during its own till session, which reverses its journal and puts the stock back.
- Confirm the stock at the venue location is back to where it started.
Anything wrong at this point can still be fixed before the first fan reaches the front of the queue.
When the show is over
Set-up done properly makes the end of the night simpler too: leftovers are counted against a location you trust, and the tent's takings line up with real products. For moving boxes out and back again, see moving stock to the venue and back, and for opening several tills with their own floats, see pop-up tills and floats.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
