Stock takes and adjustments

You’ll need: Inventory transactions, Business locations — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

However careful everyone is, the system and the shelf will drift apart. A stock take is how you bring them back together honestly.

What a stock take is

A count, recorded as a transaction, that reconciles the system to physical reality at a location.

Note the direction: reality is right and the system is corrected. A count is not an opportunity to make the shelf agree with the record — if the two differ, the shelf wins, and the difference is information.

Count in a frozen moment

The practical trap is counting a location while it is trading. Goods move during the count, and you end up reconciling to a moment that never existed.

Count when movement is stopped, or count a section at a time and stop that section. An approximate count of a still warehouse is far more useful than a precise count of a moving one.

The variance is the point

The number people care about is the new balance. The number that is actually worth something is the difference.

A location that is consistently short on the same item is telling you something: theft, breakage nobody recorded, receipts entered at the wrong location, or units being sold in a different measure from the one they are held in. None of those are fixed by writing down a new number every quarter.

Record the count, then ask why. A stock take that only ever corrects and never explains is a task, not a control.

Wastage versus stock take

Two different admissions, and using the wrong one loses the cause.

   wastage      you know what happened  — spoiled, broken, expired
   stock take   you do not know          — it is simply not there

If you know the reason, use wastage and write it down. Reserve stock take for genuine discrepancy. A business that books everything as a stock take has no record of why anything was lost.

Opening balances happen once

Opening balance records what you held on the day you started, per item, per location. It is the starting line, used once.

Getting it right matters more than it feels at the time: every subsequent balance is that number plus every movement since, so an opening balance entered casually is an error that never washes out on its own.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, record a stock take that differs from the system, and look at how the difference is presented. Then record the same shortfall as a wastage with a reason, and compare what each one leaves behind for somebody reading it later.