Jewelry businesses face many growth challenges including increased competition from online brands, changes in consumer preferences, and the pains of jewelry order tracking.

Tracking jewelry orders and repairs can feel like a nightmare without the right software. It requires pulling inventory from multiple sources and ensuring the job is done in a timely manner. The lack of visibility on all active orders and bench jeweler availability, coupled with communication issues, can increase timelines and cause frustration for everyone, especially the customer. This is especially problematic given the increasing number of custom and repair jobs jewelry businesses are doing these days.

Thankfully, new jewelry specific task management tools, such as CaratIQ, have been developed to help jewelers manage the madness. While adopting these tools might seem daunting at first, they have proven to be effective and allow jewelers to save time and focus on what they do best, making and selling jewelry.

This article will explore various project management tools and explain how they can be helpful in managing jewelry repair and custom orders.

Generic Project Management Tools

Many jewelry businesses find that their POS software, whether dated like The Edge or more modern like Lightspeed, is lacking in project management features. This leads them to buy other generic project management softwares like Asana, Notion or Trello to fill the gaps. While such softwares do provide an improvement, they don’t integrate with jewelry point of sales. This means that the orders must be manually inputted and updated every day. This is a tedious process that is prone to errors.

Asana, for example, does not connect to jewelry softwares. This means that as bench jewelers complete jobs, they are not able to combine components or change inventory quantities in Asana. This must all be done manually after the job is completed and takes a lot of time.

Similarly, Trello might be useful for jewelry stores that do not take in many repairs or custom orders, but the interface becomes cluttered and confusing when tracking multiple projects at once. Trello also does not sync with your jewelry CRM, which makes it difficult to track which client the job is for and prevents you from communicating with them while the job is in progress.

Ultimately, any non-jewelry specific project management tool you choose will be better than its paper or excel equivalent. However, choosing one not built for jewelers will prevent you from meeting all your needs. What actually solves the problem is a single, user-friendly solution that integrates with all your other jewelry specific systems, in other words, CaratIQ.

How CaratIQ Transforms Tracking Jewelry Orders and Repairs

CaratIQ is purpose-built for the jewelry industry and has a user-friendly design you’re your team will love.

Some of CaratIQ’s most noteworthy features are its abilities to track in house and outsourced jewelry orders/repairs, its real-time inventory management, and its integrated CRM.

Let’s dive into some of CaratIQ’s features and see how they can help you manage your jewelry orders.

1. Due Date and Priority Management

Delivering jewelry orders before their due dates is an excellent way to boost customer confidence in your jewelry business and build customer loyalty. However, failing to meet order due dates is a sure way to drive customers to your competitors.

CaratIQ can speed up your order intake process by automatically creating a task with a due date when an order is sold to a customer at the POS. CaratIQ can also automatically assign a bench jeweler to the task to ensure that the job does not slip through the cracks. This also prevents you from having to manually create the task in an excel sheet or in Asana which saves you time.

Once the order is created you will be able to see a list of all pending orders with their due dates. You can then optionally assign different priorities to these orders to make sure your bench jewelers focus on the orders that matter most. Filtering and sorting options will help you identify such high priority orders. For example, orders that need to be rushed because of a tight deadline or because of a VIP client.

2. Bench Jeweler Workflow Visibility

Having visibility into your bench jeweler’s work streams is very important to ensure that they are working on the highest priority orders and that the orders are appropriately shared. This was historically difficult given the volume of orders that jewelry businesses work on simultaneously and the time needed to manually update their statuses.

CaratIQ’s task management module integrates with your staff’s schedules and provides real time insights into each bench jeweler’s tasks. This allows you to see all the jobs they are currently working on and the details of each job e.g. materials required, notes and sketches. As your bench jewelers work on their orders, all your employees will be able to see live progress updates. This prevents you from having to manually enter order updates which saves you a lot of time. It also allows you to allocate orders fairly across your bench jewelers to make sure they are all actively working.

3. Outsourced Repair and Vendor Management

Outsourced repairs need to be tracked in much the same way as in-house repairs. This proves to be a challenge for solutions like Asana as they are not able to link purchase orders to outsourced vendors or track the communications you have with outsourced vendors.

CaratIQ tracks all outsourced orders and communications as if they were being processed in house. For example, you can assign multiple vendors to each order in CaratIQ and track which vendor has the order at any point in time. You are also able to filter all your orders to see which ones are currently with the same vendor. This comes in handy as you can call the outsourced vendor (from within CaratIQ) and ask them about all outstanding orders you have with them at once. Such features not only save time but allow you to gain deep, contextual insights into your relationships with outsourced vendors.

4. Attachment of Images and Documents

CaratIQ enables you to save unlimited images, documents and STL files to each order. This is very useful as bench jewelers can have a better idea of what the piece should look like while they are working on it. These attachments prevent jewelers wasting time finding documents on disorganized file system and prevent the unnecessary back-and-forth between bench jewelers and store associates.

5. Customer Communication and Notifications

Every jeweler can relate with having their customers constantly call them about the status of their repair or custom order. While it is often distracting to jewelers, for clients these orders represent some of the most significant purchases of their lives, so it is important to provide these clients with a level of communication that builds trust and ease. This is quite difficult as every client has their preferred method of communication and tracking all of this would be a full-time job in itself.

CaratIQ offers the ability to automatically call, email and text your customers as you are working on their orders. This means that if your bench jeweler must call your customer to ask for approval or to clarify something, they can do so immediately within the task management module. This all happens in a single interface. All calls are automatically logged to the CRM and can be recorded and transcribed. Similarly, CaratIQ can automatically text and email customers when their order is completed and ready to be picked up. This will save you time as you no longer need to manually call or text customers.

Such jewelry order management features are not provided by other project management and POS softwares but are in CaratIQ as it was built for jewelers.

6. Cloud-Based Accessibility

CaratIQ is a cloud-based jewelry order management software. This means that, unlike older jewelry POS systems, you can view the status of all your orders from any device without having to be in your store. This is a huge time saver and ensures that you know how your repair and custom jewelry business is doing at any point in time.

7. Real-Time Inventory Management

CaratIQ tracks material usage and can update your jewelry inventory stock levels automatically as repair and custom orders are completed. This is a unique benefit that other softwares like Asana and Notion do not provide as they are not an integrated solution.

Final Thoughts on the Benefits of CaratIQ for Jewelry Order Management

If you are looking for a solution to manage your jewelry repair and customer orders, you should use a jewelry specific platform like CaratIQ. CaratIQ provides an easy to use jewelry order management platform that will save you time, boost your bench jeweler productivity, and ensure your customers are happy.

Are you ready to transform your jewelry business? Request a demo of CaratIQ today and tap into your store’s true potential.