Guide · counting as a routine
Cycle counting: count a little, often
A yearly stocktake tells you how wrong you were last year. Cycle counting tells you what is wrong this week, while you can still find the cause. For a small shop it is the cheaper and more useful habit — if you choose the items and the schedule deliberately.
What cycle counting is
Instead of counting every item once a year, you count a small group every day or week, on a rotating schedule. Each counted item is compared with the book, the variance is investigated, and the ledger is corrected. Over a month or a quarter, every important item is counted, and the book is never more than a few weeks out of date.
The method is standard in warehouses. It works in a shop for the same reason it works there: the count is small enough to finish, and the gap between the count and the cause is short enough to remember.
Choose what to count
Do not rotate alphabetically. Count by risk. A practical order for a small shop:
- The twenty items with the highest value on hand. A mistake here costs the most.
- The ten fastest-moving items. A mistake here repeats every week.
- Items that have shown a variance before. Repeat offenders until two clean counts in a row.
- Items with a recent delivery, transfer or return. Movement is where recording breaks.
- Everything else, slowly. A full rotation over a quarter is enough for a small catalogue.
A shop with 700 SKUs and five counts a day of ten items each covers 250 items a week, the whole catalogue in three weeks. That is more counting than most shops do in a year, and each session is ten minutes, not an evening.
Set the schedule and keep it boring
Pick a time when the shop is quiet and the location is still: before opening, after closing, or a fixed slot on a slow afternoon. Put it in the calendar and give it an owner. A cycle count that depends on someone remembering will stop in the second week.
Keep the session small. Ten to twenty lines is enough to finish and review. If a count takes an hour, it is a stocktake, and it will be postponed.
In Mobile Inventory, start a count, count the chosen lines blind, review the variance and submit once. The count history on the web keeps each session, so the trend is visible without a spreadsheet. The submitted count is one stocktake with one movement per variance; a retry after a dropped connection is reported as a duplicate rather than written twice.
Investigate before you adjust
A variance is a question, not a correction. Before you accept it, check the ledger: what was the last movement, who recorded it, and when? The three usual answers are a delivery that was never received, a sale or breakage that was never recorded, or a unit error in the count itself.
If the physical count is right, submit it. The adjustment is honest because the count was honest. What you must not do is adjust the book to match an expectation you did not count — that turns cycle counting into a way of hiding the problem more often.
Measure accuracy, not effort
Two numbers are enough:
- Line accuracy — counted lines that match the book, divided by lines counted, as a percentage. It tells you how often the book is right.
- Value accuracy — the same calculation weighted by cost. It tells you how much money the errors represent.
Record both after each session. A shop at 98% line accuracy with one large value error has a different problem from a shop at 90% with many small ones, and the fix is different too. The trend over a month is more useful than any single session.
What cycle counting does not fix
It does not fix a process that creates the errors. If deliveries are received a day late, cycle counting will find them a day late, every day. If staff cannot record a breakage because the app is on someone else's phone, the count will keep finding breakage. Use the variance to find the process, then change the process.
It also does not replace a full stocktake for accounting or year-end purposes, if your accountant requires one. It makes that stocktake shorter, because most of the catalogue has been counted recently and the remaining variances are known.
A four-week start
- Week 1: count the twenty highest-value items. Note the variances and their causes.
- Week 2: count the ten fastest movers plus last week's worst offenders.
- Week 3: count items with a delivery in the last seven days.
- Week 4: count the previous three weeks' variances again. Two clean counts close an item.
At the end of the month you have a value-accurate picture of the stock that matters and a list of the processes that produced the errors. That is a better result than a yearly count, and it took twenty minutes a week.
Tools that help
You need a way to count blind, a ledger with actor and time, and a history you can read later. Mobile Inventory provides those on a phone, offline if the stockroom has no signal. A printedcount sheet is still useful for a helper without an account; the numbers can be entered afterwards.
For the full stocktake method, read how to run a stocktake on a phone. For the buying side, the reorder-point calculator turns a minimum into a quantity.