Hi..we just finished our fall Scholastic Book fair and your Vp is right, you don't have to count or inventory your sales. The way we have always done scholastic is having a start up amonut and at the end of the day we subtract that off the total equaling our total sales. If we give out any coupons we add them into the figure because they are sales we owe scholastic for.They do need deposit slips from your sales....make sure that your start up amount is deposited seperate. I'm not sure how they do it but Im guessing the fact that you only receive 20-30% means that they must think they cover any losses.They also request you send back all boxes whether they are empty or not so they also go by box count. As far as volunteers setting books aside to pay for later it happens all the time, i guess this is a trust matter.The only real rule we have is that they can not check themselves out and i have never had anyone complain about this. We have only ever caught one student taking a book and the way we have our fair on open house night they have to walk by the four cashiers to get in and out.I think it's one of those things that I don't know how you can change the procedures without causing problems ...it has always worked for us.
I'm a new PTO president. Book Fair time is coming up and since I'm new to the ballgame, I had some questions for the folks in our group that had run a Fair before. I was told that we don't have to worry about receipts or keeping track of the books that we've sold.
This sounds fishy. How does Scholastic know how many books we've sold? How do we know if our receipts match the cash box? I don't want to contact our Scholastic Rep. because she's "tight" with the V.P. and it's the VP who's telling me we don't have to keep a record.
When I asked how we keep track of any books or funds, I was told that we don't have to worry about the kids walking off with the books because the teachers keep their eyes peeled.
I'm not worried about the kids...it's some of the parents I am worried about. I've seen volunteers put books aside and say they are going to buy them later, but since I've never stuck around for the WHOLE day, who knows if they really do.
I hate to be so suspicious, but this sounds that a really poor way to run any kind of sale...what's to keep someone from walking of with a $20 from the cash box? And how in the world would we know?
Anyone out there that could shed some light on this?
