Wallis has a chain of some 70 fashion shops in the UK and Europe, through which they sell clothes they manufacture themselves. Robin Happe joined Wallis some three years ago, and this paper outlines the methods which the company uses to furnish the data necessary for the reporting system around which merchandising procedures revolve. He describes how these methods have evolved over the years to keep pace with the general growth in the company's activities, using, currently, sophisticated data entry techniques. This paper was originally presented at the Information Studies conference ‘Data communications for retail management’, in London in March. Robin Happe is no longer with Wallis, having taken up a post in the West Indies.