How To Do Stock Take Inventory

What is stock take? What is the importance and how do you do?

What is a stock take and why is it important?

The stock take is the fundamental part of any business dealing with goods. It’s a way to keep a track of your inventory, ordering process and reduce over stocking.

In order to achieve these goals a firm process is needed to carry out the stock take itself.

How to do stock taking

1. Choose a good time

It is crucially important to conduct your stock check at the right time. It can be a time-consuming process and you need to pick a day when you’ll have all the resources you need. It may require setting staff hours aside during a less busy period or, in some circumstances, might even require you to shut up shop for the day while you get your house in order.

2. Print your stock sheets

You need to have printable stock sheets built in your existing system stock taking system. It is basis document against which you’ll judge your new count. You need to use the most up to date records you have.

3. Organise your stock carefully

Be careful to set aside any stock that has been sold already but yet to be delivered to the customer and you should start categorizing your existing stock after this. Your total stock will fall into a number of different categories, and it will be easier to properly account for everything you have if you begin with a system. It may also involve physically moving items around your premises.

4. Organise staff

Make sure to organise properly if your staff helping out with your stock takes. Once you categorize stock, appoint a separate staff member to each category and more staff to larger categories. Ensure that any distractions are minimised and reduce any extraneous noise wherever possible. While the stock take exercise is being carried out it is good to ban on phones and radio.

5. Don’t guestimate!

It’s crucial that your stock take is accurate, and this requires methodical counting and there should be no guess work done. Mark items to avoid duplicate counting as you go in order. Process can be simplified more significantly through the use of logical categories for stock. Make sure to remove items that are already been removed from the areas being counted.

6. Validate your stock take

Validate your stock take once your count is finished. Compare your stock count to the earlier stock records you printed out. Any inconsistencies should be noted and accounted for. Make sure to properly track intra-store transfers if you have multiple branches and that purchase orders are being effectively dealt with.

7. Update your stock records

Finally you need to update your stock records with the results of your latest stock take count. It should be a simple process if you are using any software solution to track the stock. Think of moving to digital if you are still using the paper based systems.