Here’s a question most cigar shop owners haven’t been asked: what is your inventory actually worth, right now, today?
Not what your POS says. Not the valuation your accountant pulled from your books last quarter. Today’s answer.
Most shops can’t give that number. And the reason isn’t poor bookkeeping — it’s structural.
Two inventory values, not one
There are two answers to “what’s my inventory worth”:
- What it cost you — the prices you paid when you took delivery, entered into your POS, and carried forward on your books ever since.
- What it’s worth today — what a fresh order of the same cigars would cost at your manufacturer’s current wholesale.
Under normal accounting, the first number is what gets reported. That’s fine for tax purposes. It’s deeply misleading for everything else.
The drift
Manufacturers raise wholesale prices over time. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. If you haven’t updated the prices in your POS since you entered each SKU, you’re carrying a growing delta between your book value and reality.
A shop with even a modest inventory can be sitting on a double-digit percentage of under-counted value. On a large inventory, the gap is meaningful money — six figures in some cases. It’s not imagined; it’s what the manufacturer invoice would show if you placed the order today.
Why this matters on paper
- Margin calculations look worse than reality. You’re measuring margin against costs that have gone up, but retail numbers that haven’t. The POS shows a thin spread that isn’t really there.
- Insurance coverage lags actual value. If you’re insured against inventory loss at book value, a claim pays out at outdated numbers.
- Shop valuations for sale, financing, or partnership discussions start from a deflated asset line. A healthy chunk of the business’s real value isn’t reflected anywhere.
Why this matters in the register
The more visible problem: you’re ringing sales at your old prices. Every sale at an under-priced cigar is margin you could have captured. Not every retailer cares to pass through every wholesale increase to the customer, but that’s a choice they should get to make — not an accident of their POS being frozen in time.
What changes when pricing flows
Connect a shop’s catalog to a pipeline that’s actually current, and two things happen on day one:
- Every SKU gets re-priced. Not by guess, by the manufacturer’s latest published wholesale. Your POS suddenly shows what your cigars are actually worth.
- The register catches up. From that point forward, register sales reflect current pricing. Margin stops eroding because the math is honest.
The inventory didn’t get more valuable. It’s always been worth current-market pricing. The POS just couldn’t see it. Now it can.
The usual reaction
Shop owners we’ve shown this to have two reactions, usually in order:
- “Wait, so I already own that value?” — yes
- “Where was it?” — right there on the shelf, invisible to the register
That’s the gap CigarLink closes. Request access if you want to see the number for your own shop.