Carrying out a stocktake is nobody’s favourite part of running a store — but it is a very important part, especially if you start branching out into ecommerce, or you’re selling food items. But once you're into the rhythm of them, and have good processes in place, there's no need for them to be too painful. Here's how to do a stocktake.
A stocktake should take place outside of store opening hours. That’s because you need to be able to definitively cut off sales while you’re carrying out the stocktake — selling items in the middle will mess up your numbers, and be a huge distraction.
It can be hard to figure out how long you need for a stocktake, but it’s important to try to set expectations for any staff helping you out (or willing partners, or friends!). You can get a rough estimate by doing a corner of the shop yourself as a trial run first. If you can do about an eighth of the shop in an hour, you know it’s an eight hour task in total, or four hours between two.
But don’t forget to factor in breaks! That’s something we’ll get into in step five.
If you have a properly-configured electronic POS system, you can generate a list of all the products you have in your store, including different variants. The POS system will also show you how much of each item it believes you have in stock.
If you don’t yet have a POS system but want one, timing this with a stocktake is ideal. You’ll have an exact breakdown of all the products in your store, just ready to upload onto your new system.
But for now, you’ll have to take a manual record. Remember to break each product out by variant, i.e. instead of ‘12 tshirts’, you need ‘2 red tshirts, size medium’ etc.
💡 Top tip: Got products that have been paid for, but not delivered or collected yet? Be sure to keep these out the way, and don’t include them in your stocktake or you’ll mess up your numbers.
📚 Bookmark for later: 7 Best Inventory Management Software for Retail
It’s so important to be really clear from the start about who is doing what. Fail to prepare, and you could end up wasting time by double counting items — or worse, reporting incorrect figures!
You’re best placed to decide how this looks for your store. Our advice is just to take your time here to avoid wasted time down the line.
This sounds like a really obvious point, but it’s so important not to guesstimate when doing a stocktake.
For example, if you see you’re meant to have 12 of a certain mug in stock, it can be tempting to have a quick glance at the shelf and think ‘that looks about right’. But it’s essential that you take the time to count them all one by one.
If you have an electronic POS system, you can actually use the barcode scanner to scan each item individually, and the system will count them automatically. This removes any temptation to guess, and will also stop you from losing count at any point.
📚 Bookmark for later: 13 Retail Store Layouts & Customer Flow Tips
It’s important to keep energised and alert while carrying out a stocktake, so be sure to factor in regular breaks. If you’re working with a team, it’s also a nice idea to provide some coffees or snacks to keep the energy up.
💡 Top tip: Not got anyone to help with your stocktake? Make it more manageable by trying an alternative called cycle counting. For most people, this looks like ‘little and often’ stocktakes of different products/parts of the store, rather than doing it all in one hit. Others take this a step further by prioritising top products, or even just testing a sample of products rather than your full inventory (although we wouldn’t recommend this until you’ve done a few full ones).
Before you reopen sales, it’s vital you input the up-to-date stock figures into your POS system — otherwise, all your hard work has been for nothing!
Unless you’ve been scanning items individually, this is unfortunately a case of going through and adding these in manually.
You’ll be pleased to know that this isn’t something you need to do on the same day as actually completing your stocktake! But try to carve out some time over the following days to analyse the results. Where there were unexpected differences between the POS numbers and your own, you may need to think about having a reshuffle of stock, providing more training to staff, or getting in touch with your supplier, depending on the issue.
Even if you use a digital inventory management system, physical stocktakes are important because they can help you…
You should now feel confident in carrying out a relatively pain-free stocktake. The only question that remains is: how often should you do one?
Again, the answer depends a lot on the type of store you have, and your confidence in your current systems.
When it comes to managing inventory, there’s plenty of great technology out there to support you. That said, we still see plenty of value in a traditional, physical stocktake, and the steps above will help make sure it’s worth your while.
Have you ever uncovered anything surprising while carrying out a stocktake? Got any top tips we can include in the steps above? Drop us a comment below!
Not registered with CREOATE yet? Sign up now and shop wholesale with us today.
If you're looking to calculate the total value of your stock, use the excel formula SUM(Stock price*Quantity) for each item, and then add the result for each product together to give a final total.
Stock taking is part of stock management. A stocktake tells you how much stock you have; it's a simple snapshot of how things are. Stock management is more concerned with optimising your stock levels so you're selling more of the things that make you more money, reducing the amount of stock that goes 'dead', and moving things through your store quickly. So stocktakes are a measure of how your stock management is going.
Different shops choose to approach their stocktaking using different methods, including:
Annual stocktaking: One big, full stocktake every year
Spot checks: Periodically checking stock of one item to see if internal records are correct
Periodic stocktaking: Doing a stocktake once every few months
Continuous stocktaking: Tackling different products at different times, and different frequencies, rather than trying to do the whole store at once