Stock takes and adjustments

Before you start, open these pages: Stock / Inventory Transactions and Settings / Business Locations.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

However careful everybody is, the system and the shelf will drift apart. A stock take is how you bring them back together honestly.

What a stock take is

A count, recorded as a stock movement, that lines the system up with what is really there in one place.

Notice which way round that is. What is on the shelf is right, and the system gets corrected.

A count is not a chance to make the shelf agree with the record. If the two differ, the shelf wins. And the difference is information.

Count when nothing is moving

The practical trap is counting a place while it is still trading.

Goods move during the count, and you end up lining the system up with a moment that never existed.

So count when movement has stopped. Or count one section at a time, and stop that section.

A rough count of a still warehouse is far more useful than a precise count of a moving one.

The difference is the point

The number people look at is the new balance.

The number actually worth something is the difference.

A place that is always short on the same item is telling you something. Theft. Breakage nobody recorded. Receipts entered at the wrong place. Or units being sold in a different measure from the one they are stored in.

None of those get fixed by writing down a new number every three months.

So record the count, then ask why. A stock take that only ever corrects and never explains is a chore, not a control.

Wastage or stock take?

These are two different admissions, and using the wrong one loses the reason.

   wastage      you know what happened:  spoiled, broken, expired
   stock take   you do not know:         it is simply not there

If you know the reason, use wastage and write it down.

Save stock take for when something really is just missing.

A business that books everything as a stock take has no record of why it lost anything.

Opening balances happen once

Opening balance records what you were holding on the day you started. Per item, per place.

It is the starting line, used once.

Getting it right matters more than it feels at the time. Every balance after it is that number plus every movement since. So an opening balance typed in carelessly is an error that never washes out on its own.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, record a stock take that differs from the system, and look at how the difference is shown.

Then record the same shortfall as a wastage with a reason. Compare what each one leaves behind for somebody reading it later.