Three sites, three versions of the truth
The system says the warehouse has twelve. The warehouse says it has four. The branch across town has some, probably, but nobody is sure how many, so someone rings them. They check, call back, and the customer has already bought elsewhere.
Once a quarter everyone counts. The count never matches the system, so the numbers get adjusted to whatever was counted, and nobody finds out why the gap appeared in the first place. A few weeks later the drift is back.
If you run more than one site, van, store or warehouse, this is probably familiar. It gets worse as locations are added, because every extra site is another place for stock to move without being recorded.
Where the missing units go
Stock very rarely vanishes. It moves, and the movement is not recorded, or is recorded in a different place to the stock figure. The usual culprits:
- Transfers between sites written on a note or sent by text, never entered in the system.
- Returns put back on the shelf without being booked in.
- Damaged or expired items thrown away and not written off.
- Engineers or drivers taking stock for a job and using it without recording which job.
- Deliveries received but booked in days later, or against the wrong site.
Each site usually has its own way of dealing with these, often a spreadsheet of its own, and the central figure is only as good as the slowest site's paperwork. The count is not the problem. The recording between counts is.
What the mismatch costs
| Consequence | What you see |
|---|---|
| Sales lost to phantom stock | System shows stock that is not there, customer is let down |
| Overordering | Buyers order more because they do not trust the figure |
| Stock stranded at the wrong site | One location short while another sits on plenty |
| Time spent on calls and checks | Staff ringing round before every promise |
| Write-offs with no explanation | Adjustments at count time that teach you nothing |
Overordering is the quiet one. When people stop believing the number, they keep a buffer, and that buffer is cash sitting on shelves across your sites.
How SpiderHunts builds one stock record
- Walk through each site's stock movements with the people who do them, and list every way stock enters, leaves or moves.
- Set up one stock database, or configure your existing stock or ecommerce system if it can hold multiple locations properly, so every site reads and writes the same record.
- Give each movement a fast capture method: barcode or QR scan on a phone, a transfer screen that needs both sending and receiving sites to confirm, a returns screen at the counter.
- Link stock used on jobs to the job itself, so van and engineer stock is deducted when the job is completed.
- Connect sales channels such as Shopify, the till or your ordering system through their APIs, so sales reduce the right site's stock straight away.
- Run cycle counts on a small set of items each week rather than one big count, and show the variance per item and site with the movements since the last count, so gaps can be traced.
- Send alerts when a site drops below its reorder level, with a suggested transfer from a site that has spare before a new purchase is raised.
If you already have a stock system that works in principle, we connect to it and fix the gaps in capture rather than replacing it. The software is rarely the weak point. The moments where stock moves without anyone recording it are.
Trusting the number again
Staff at any location can see what every site holds without ringing anyone. Transfers are visible from both ends, so a box in transit is not lost between two spreadsheets. Counts turn up small differences that can be traced to a specific day and movement, instead of one big unexplained adjustment.
Buyers can order against the figure because it is right more often, and stock can be moved to where it is needed rather than bought again.
It also becomes much easier to add a site. A new location is a new entry in the system with its own reorder levels, not a new spreadsheet.
Is your stock drifting?
- Staff ring other sites to check stock before promising a customer.
- Your stock counts regularly disagree with the system by more than a few units.
- Transfers between locations are arranged by phone, text or a paper note.
- Van or engineer stock is not linked to the jobs it is used on.
- You hold extra stock because nobody trusts the figures.