"Borrowing" inventory

[martinpitt]

I work at a non-profit and we are trying to streamline our inventory management, customer tracking, and payment system. Our problem is that our inventory is set up like a library — customers purchase a membership that allows them to "borrow" our resources. We need to be able to track who are customers are, when they visit, what items they "check out", and when they return them. It's set up that our customers can borrow up to 5 items for 3 weeks at a time. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this or what software to use, I would greatly appreciate it! 

[Helen]

Hey @martinpitt! Thanks for your post, this is an interesting idea.

So you could use Square to manage your memberships, for example wtih recurring Invoices. Additionally, you can create customer profiles and then add a customer to a sale in order to track the items they purchased (or in your case loaned). 

However, the Point of Sale app wouldn't be a good option if you plan on accepting payments for these borrowed items and then refunding the payment. Refunds should only be used for actual refunds, not as a workaround to pre-authorize a card. What's more, though refunds typically take 2-7 days to be processed, in some cases it can take 14 business days.

There also wouldn't be a way to track when an item is due to be returned, which sounds like it would be important to you. It might be better to research software that can manage items on loans and due dates!