Stock ageing shows how long each stone has been in your stock since it arrived, and how much money sits in each age band — usually up to 30 days, 31–60, 61–90 and over 90. In a trade where a stone can be worth lakhs, old stock is capital that is not working: the older band is the first place to look for stones to re-price, memo out or sell.
What is stock ageing?
Every stone has a day it arrived — the purchase, the supplier’s memo or the jewellery receipt it came on. Its age is the number of days since then. Stock ageing groups all your stones by that age and adds up what they cost you in each group.
The result answers one question: of the money in my stock, how much has been sitting there for a month, two months, three months, longer?
Why do stones older than 90 days matter?
A dealer’s profit comes from turning stock: buying, selling and buying again. A stone that has not sold in three months has earned nothing in that time, while the money in it could have been turning — and if it is borrowed money, it has been costing interest.
Old stock is also a price signal. A stone that every buyer has seen and passed on is usually priced above the market. Prices move, and stones bought before a fall in the market can only get harder to sell the longer they wait.
What should count in stock ageing?
- Stones in the safe — the obvious part.
- Stones out on memo with customers or brokers: they are still yours, still your capital, and still ageing.
- Stones with makers (karigars) for jewellery: the same — they are yours until they are set and sold.
- Not stones you hold on someone else’s memo: they are not your capital. Look at them separately if you want to know how long you have held them.
At cost or at selling price?
Ageing is first a capital question, so it is read at cost: what you paid. When stones were bought in dollars, the cost in your own currency is the dollar price at the exchange rate of the day you bought — the same figure your books use.
Selling value is a useful second column — what the old stones would bring at your asking prices today. A large gap between the two in the oldest band says the asking prices may need a look.
A worked example
A dealer holds ₹2 crore of stock at cost: ₹60 lakh up to 30 days old, ₹45 lakh at 31–60 days, ₹35 lakh at 61–90 days and ₹60 lakh over 90 days. Over 90 days is 30% of the stock — nearly a third of the capital has not turned in a quarter.
If that money is borrowed at 12% a year, the ₹60 lakh over 90 days costs ₹7.2 lakh a year, or ₹60,000 every month it waits. That is the figure to weigh when deciding whether to cut the price of an old stone: a sale at a smaller margin today can be worth more than the full price in six months.
What to do with old stock
- Look at the oldest band each week, stone by stone, starting with the largest values.
- Check the asking price against today’s market, and re-price where the stone has been passed over.
- Send it out on memo to buyers who have not seen it, or to another branch or market.
- Look at which suppliers and which kinds of stone end up in the oldest band — that is a buying lesson.
How Avirat shows stock ageing
Avirat’s Stock Ageing report puts every stone you own — in the safe, out on memo and with makers — into age bands you choose (30, 60 and 90 days by default), with the capital at cost in your main currency and its share of the total, and the value at your selling rates at today’s exchange rate. Filter by branch, supplier or department, open the stones in any band, and export to Excel. The dashboard shows the same capital-by-age bars, and the Stock screen can filter stones by age. Stones you hold on someone else’s memo are left out unless you ask for them.
See how Avirat handles this: Diamond software