Keeping inventory accurate

The situation

Picture an illustrative Surat saree wholesaler with about 3,000 designs, most in several colours. Retailers order on the website, on WhatsApp and in person at the shop. One afternoon a retailer in Indore orders twenty pieces of a georgette design in maroon. The website shows thirty in stock. The godown has eleven, because a walk in buyer took a bundle that morning and nobody updated the system.

The order has to be split or partly cancelled, the retailer is annoyed, and someone spends an hour on the phone. Multiply that by a busy season and stock errors quietly cost more than most merchants realise.

Accurate inventory comes from habits more than software. The software keeps one count; people keep it true.

Step one: start from a clean count

If your numbers are already doubtful, fix them once before anything else.

• Pick a quiet day and pause dispatch for a few hours, or count after closing.
• Count by location: shelf, rack, bin or bundle. Write the location next to each count.
• Count variants separately. Eleven maroon and nine green is useful. Twenty of the design is not.
• Have a second person recount a sample. If their numbers differ often, slow down and recount that area.
• Enter the counts in the admin the same day, and note the date of the count.

On ShopenUp, inventory tracking is native and works at the variant level, so each size or colour has its own count. See catalogue and inventory.

Step two: record every movement

Stock goes wrong when something moves and the system does not hear about it. List every way stock leaves or enters, and make sure each one is recorded:

• Online orders. Reduced automatically when the order is placed.
• Orders taken in person or on the phone. Enter them in the admin as orders, so they reduce stock like any other.
• Returns. Add stock back only after the item has been checked and is fit to sell. Damaged returns go to a separate count.
• New stock arriving. Update counts when the goods are on the shelf, after checking the supplier's delivery note.
• Samples, gifts and damage. Write them off with a reason. These small leaks add up.

Give one person ownership of each movement type. "Everyone updates stock" usually means nobody does.

Step three: cycle counts

A full count once a year leaves eleven months for errors to pile up. A cycle count means counting a small part of your stock often, such as one rack every morning, so the whole store is counted every few weeks.

A simple way to plan it:

1. Split stock into groups. Fast sellers and high value items go in the first group.
2. Count the first group every week, the rest once a month or once a quarter.
3. Compare the count with the system. If they differ, find out why before you correct the number.
4. Keep a short log: date, item, system count, real count, reason.

After a few months the log tells you where errors come from. Often it is one process, such as walk in sales not entered or returns added back before inspection.

Step four: reserved stock

Between a buyer placing an order and the parcel leaving the building, that stock belongs to someone. If it still shows as available, it can be sold twice.

On ShopenUp, stock is reduced when an order is placed, and partial fulfilment lets you ship what you have and keep the rest of the order open. If an order is cancelled, the stock goes back. Check that your team follows the same order in practice: pick from the order list, mark as packed, ship.

For pre orders, made to order items or bulk orders waiting for payment, decide in writing when stock is held and for how long.

Step five: safety stock

Safety stock is a small buffer you keep back from what the store shows. If you have ten units, the store might show eight. It covers counting errors, items found damaged at packing, and sales that happen at the same moment in two places.

Use it on fast sellers and on items that are hard to restock quickly. Skip it on slow movers where a stock out costs little. Review the buffer after each cycle count: if errors are rare, shrink it.

Selling in several places

When the same stock sells on your website, in a shop and on a marketplace, accuracy gets harder. There are three common approaches:

• Separate stock for each channel. Simple, but stock can sit unsold in one place while another runs out.
• One shared count with a buffer. Each channel shows a little less than the real total.
• Sync. A sale in any channel reduces the count everywhere.

On ShopenUp, the storefront and orders entered in the admin share one count from day one. Connecting a marketplace or a point of sale system so they share that count is integration work we build for you. Our guide on marketplace or your own store covers the wider trade off.

More than one godown

If stock sits in two or more places, such as a shop and a warehouse, you need counts by location and rules for which location fills which order. Multi warehouse stock is built for you on ShopenUp, scoped to how your locations actually work. Until then, many merchants keep one location as the online stock and move goods into it on a schedule.

Limits

No system fixes stock that people move without recording. The first few months after a clean count are where habits form. Expect some errors, look for the cause each time, and fix the process behind it. Variant heavy catalogues need more care, and our guide to structuring a catalogue with thousands of variants helps set them up well.

Checklist

• A full, dated count by location and variant.
• Every stock movement listed, with an owner.
• Returns added back only after inspection.
• A cycle count plan with fast sellers counted weekly.
• A log of differences and their causes.
• Safety stock set on fast sellers and reviewed monthly.
• A decision on how stock is shared across channels.

The launch checklist includes the stock steps to finish before a store goes live.