The City of Houston City Council recently passed new ordinances requiring the use of specific technologies to aid law enforcement in their efforts to prevent the theft of gold and silver. Or at least that’s what they’re telling us and we’ve got to comply. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter at this point. You’re going to need gold buying software if you want to buy gold in Houston.
The requirements are pretty clear: You have to collect a photo of the items you’re buying (or enter a long, detailed description), you have to collect a picture of the seller, get their signature, get their thumbprint and address, phone number, etc…then you have to create a receipt, the receipt has to contain specific verbiage that informs the seller that they must comply with the municipal code regarding precious metals sales, etc…and then, after all of that – you have to make a report to LeadsOnline…every single item you bought has to be reported.
Obviously, you’d like to be able to automate these tasks to make it a little bit easier. And if you put all this hardware together and have the skills to make it all work for you, then you are pretty much your own IT department. But if you need someone or something to help you ease the transition into this brave new world of data collection, I might be able to help.
At Houston Gold Merchants, we been using a custom-made software system of our own design for about eight months. It works fine, does all that we need it to do and meets the criteria of the City of Houston ordinances. It takes a picture of the items once they hit the scale – as soon as the weight is stable, a picture is snapped.
Then you choose the metal type and the purity. Then you use pull down menus to create a description, save it and you’re done. At the end of the transaction, scan the license of the seller, collect their thumbprint, photo and signature and you’re done.
It’s easy. And it’s fairly cheap. It’s cost me about 5000 bucks to put this all together. I’m probably going to sell a barebones model for 500 dollars a copy.
If you’re interested, contact me at Houston Gold Merchants 832 259 7225
