Inventory reports

Before you start, open these. They are both under Stock in the menu: Stock levels and Lot reports.

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.

There are two kinds of stock report. They answer different questions.

Inventory reports: what you have, and where

This report shows what you are holding right now. You can narrow it down two ways.

• By location. That means one shop or one store. Use this to see what one branch is holding.
• By category. That means a group of similar items. Use this to see one type of goods across all your shops at once.

Lot reports: which batch, and how old

A lot is one batch of goods that arrived together.

A lot report can filter by item, by batch number, by expiry date, by location, and by where the goods came from.

You met lots in an earlier lesson. Two habits are worth repeating, because they are the most useful ones in this whole course.

• Run expiry before once a week. It shows you what is about to go bad.
• Run origin when goods have to be recalled. It shows you which batch came from where.

What these reports will not tell you

They will not tell you that something has stopped selling.

A fast seller and a slow seller both just show up as a number. But the slow one is costing you money, quietly. It takes up space. Your cash is stuck inside it. One day it expires and you throw it away.

So how do you spot it? Two ways. Run the same report again next week or next month, and compare. Or open the item and read its list of movements. A short list means the item is not moving. Nothing warns you about this. You have to go and look.

Check a number before you trust it

About to make a decision based on a stock number? Buying more, promising goods to a customer, throwing something away? Take one minute first. Open the item and read its movements.

When a stock number turns out to be wrong, it is nearly always one of these four things.

• Someone recorded the movement at the wrong shop or store.
• Goods were sent from one place, and nobody marked them as received at the other.
• A loss everyone knew about was recorded as “we counted less than expected” instead of “this was damaged”. Now nobody knows why it went.
• A document should have moved stock but did not, because the product was never linked to a stock item.

You can see all four in the list of movements. You cannot see any of them in the number on its own.

You have finished

That is the end of Inventory and Stock. Here is what you now know.

• Only a transaction moves stock. Every other document just causes one.
• There are four different quantities, and you know which one to act on.
• What each type of stock movement means.
• How lots and expiry dates work.
• How production turns raw materials into finished goods.
• How transfers keep goods visible while they are on the road.
• The difference between counting less than you expected, and a loss you already knew about.

The next course is Purchasing and Suppliers. That is where most of the stock in this course came from in the first place.

Keep staging.feeprime.com open while you work through it.