Stockovaa Team6 min read
How to run a stock count without closing the shop
Full-day shutdowns are not the only way to reconcile inventory. Cycle counting spreads the work across ordinary trading days and finds discrepancies sooner.
Most shops treat stock counting as an annual event: close on a Sunday, count everything, argue about the variances on Monday. It is expensive, it is exhausting, and by the time you find a discrepancy it is months old and impossible to explain.
Count a slice, not the whole warehouse
Cycle counting splits your catalogue into groups and counts one group at a time, on ordinary trading days. Nothing closes. A staff member counts thirty lines before opening, the system records the variance, and you move on.
- Group by value: your fastest-moving 20% of lines usually carry 80% of the shrinkage risk. Count those monthly.
- Count mid-shelf lines quarterly and slow movers twice a year.
- Count before the doors open, never during a rush, a count taken while stock is moving is not a count.
- Record the variance every time, including zero. A count with no record is a count you cannot audit.
Read the variance, do not just correct it
The adjustment is the least interesting part. What matters is the pattern: one line short every month is theft or miscounting at goods-in; a whole category short after a promotion is usually a pricing or scanning error at the till.
What good looks like
A shop running cycle counts properly can tell you, on any given day, which lines were last counted and what the variance was. That is the difference between managing inventory and reacting to it.