Stock that matches the shelf

Ask a shopkeeper why they stopped using the stock feature of whatever software they tried, and the answer is almost always the same. The number was wrong once, then wrong again, and after that nobody looked at it.

Why the numbers drift

Stock drifts for ordinary reasons, not exotic ones:

• A sale rung up without the item, because the queue was long.
• Goods received and put on the shelf before anybody wrote them down.
• Breakage, expiry and samples that never get recorded at all.
• The same product entered twice under two slightly different names.

Every one of these is a small, human thing. Together they are why the system says eleven and the shelf has seven.

Count what matters, not everything

A full count of a general store is a weekend of work, which is why it never happens. Counting your top fifty lines takes an hour and catches most of the money. Those fifty are where your cash actually sits.

Do that monthly. Leave the long tail for twice a year.

One name per product

Two entries for the same tin — one from the counter, one from the purchase book — will quietly ruin any stock figure. Decide the name once, with the size in it, and use it everywhere: Cooking oil 5L tin, not "oil" today and "cooking oil" tomorrow.

Record the reason, not just the change

When stock is adjusted, the useful question is not "by how much" but "why". Breakage, expiry, a sample given to a customer, a correction after a count — each says something different about the shop. A month of adjustments with reasons attached tells you whether you have a wastage problem, a supplier problem, or a counting problem.

The test of a stock system

It is simple: pick three products at random, count them, and compare. If the system matches the shelf three times out of three, the number is worth acting on. If it does not, fix the process before trusting the figure — no software can fix a count that never happened.