Every financial year, stock counting takes businesses by surprise a little, as what seems like a task that would get easier as the business grows only becomes more tedious, complex and time-consuming when not properly managed. At Acumen Computer Systems, we want to help businesses efficiently manage their stock to help remove the stress of doing the final stock count in June. There are three ways our technology can help you and your business stay on top of stock counting. They are:
- Stock Adjustments
- Spot Counts
- Comprehensive Stocktake
Stock Adjustments
Stock adjustments are the simplest form of stock counting, but when manually completed, can be open for human error. Acumen’s stock adjustment assists businesses in adjusting their stock by simply adding or subtracting to the number of stock available. For example, if you find two units of your product are damaged and cannot be sold, you can remove this stock from your inventory in the stock adjustment section by inputting -2 into the quantity section. Unlike other stock counting techniques, -2 will not become your new total but will merely adjust the total to remove two units. Stock adjustments can be done weekly or fortnightly and are a great way to ensure that all of your inventory is being stored, utilised and promoted correctly.
Spot Counts
Spot counts are partial stocktakes that usually count one product or set of related products. It is a technique and software element that can help finetune your end-of-financial-year stocktake so that there are fewer errors. Spot counts also are a time-efficient tool as they can be programmed for less stressful or busy times of the year and ensure that the software you are utilising is correct. With a spot count, you are adjusting the total to the number of stocks you have counted and should not be confused with a stock adjustment. The amount you input into the quantity column will be your new total of stock. Using the example above, if two units are missing from a stockpile of 96, your new total is now 94 units which is what you should input into the quantity column (as seen below).
Stocktakes
Stocktakes are a complete audit of all of your inventory and should be completed at the end of each month, but sometimes time can get away from us. To relieve the stress of the end of financial year stocktakes should at least be completed every 2-3 months. At Acumen, we provide businesses with stocktake software that works alongside their POS software for the most accurate inventory control. Stocktaking is very similar to spot counts, however, spot counts do not allow you to add stock as you count, the quantity entered in spot counts will be considered the total amount of stock on hand. Stocktaking, however, allows you to add stock as you continue to count.
There are three ways you can choose to stock count; After Hours Stocktaking, Live Stocktaking and Backdated Stocktakes.
After hours stocktake is one of the simplest forms of stocktaking and may also be the most costly. The entire stock of the business is all counted outside of regular opening hours.
Live stocktakes take place while you are trading and are best for businesses that can set aside a portion of the business at a time. With live stocktakes, you count the stock as per the section. As you move through each section, you count the stock and add it to your on hand. After counting a section for a stocktake, any sales from the section after that reduce your on-hand accordingly. This removes any need to re-adjust your counts. It also gives you the flexibility of running a stocktake during normal working hours and can be stretched out over a couple of weeks where needed.
Backdated Stocktakes take place after the month has ended and usually before the 10th of the next month. It should only be considered an effective measure of stocktaking if you have manually collected the physical count of stock.
Other important things to consider when stocktaking
Stock Reports
Acumen software allows you to periodically check your on-hand stock via a variety of stock reports.
- Stocktake Variations: You can use this report to review items where there was a discrepancy in what you counted and what the system had on hand at the time. This can let you know if there is significant movement of stock that is not being entered into the system properly, such as wrong product codes being used, purchase orders not received in properly, etc.
- Stocktake Value: This report will give you a value of all stock takes for the month. This is not the on-hand value but simply the quantity you had counted on each stocktake.
- Stock Value: This report will give you a total of everything on hand at the time the report is run. Unlike Stocktake Value which provides the value of stock takes for each month.
- Uncounted Items: This report should be run after you have finished counting your stock for a stocktake and is useful for checking that there were no sections missed in your count. This will list all the items that were on hand but were not counted during stocktake for the current period.
Uncounted Items
Anything not counted during stocktake is an uncounted item, and in a perfect world, the on-hand of these items should be zero. If it was not counted, then it likely is not there anymore. Acumen has a very quick and easy way to zero out uncounted items as part of the stocktaking procedure.
Counting Serial-Numbered Products
Products that have serial numbers need to be entered individually during stocktaking. This is because serial numbers are unique to each individual unit, unlike lot numbers that can be unique to hundreds of units of the same product. When counting serial numbers, you will need to count all relevant serial numbers in the same stocktake. Acumen Computer Systems can assist you in customising the software to be able to handle this input.
How can Acumen help?
The team at Acumen have years of experience in customising and developing software for stock counting and inventory management for a range of businesses. We understand that stocktake isn’t easy for any business, so we provide ongoing support to our clients to ensure that they fully understand and utilise our products to their fullest potential. If you are considering upgrading or implementing stocktaking software, get in touch with the team at Acumen to find out how we can help you.
