Running a Charity Shop: Donations In, Sorting & Grading, Pricing by Category, Stock Rotation, Volunteer Hours and Profit for the Cause

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Turn a week of donation bags into items, pool the items per bag correctly and split the weekly volume into categories from a sample.
• Measure the sellable share per category and for the week, put a value on the recycling and waste streams and find the category that yields the least.
• Price new items from a category × grade grid with a two-way lookup, then total a week of sales, calculate the average price per item sold and the clothing share of sales.
• Give each rail batch its colour tag from the ISO week with MOD, count full weeks on the shelf, calculate the sell-through and the unsold items due to be pulled.
• Compare volunteer and paid hours, measure the hours needed per 1,000 items, put a fictional reporting value on volunteer time and find the most productive day.
• Calculate the net income of selling high-value donations online, decide item by item where to sell, add up the extra income and find a break-even online price.
• Apply a fictional rent relief, total the shop's annual costs and express them per m² of sales floor and per item sold.
• Bring three shops together: the net contribution each one sends to the charity, the contribution per volunteer hour, the total for the cause and a chart of income against costs.