Use case · retail
Retail: the delivery at the door and the count on Sunday
A one-location shop has two inventory moments: stock arrives, and stock is counted. Everything else is a consequence. Get those two right and the reorder list becomes the most useful screen in the shop.
The shape of the problem
A shop with 700 SKUs and a stockroom is not a warehouse. There is no receiving bay, no forklift and no inventory team: there is a back door, a delivery note and whoever is on shift. The count happens on a Sunday or before opening, on a phone, with one hand. The book is wrong most often because a delivery was put on the shelf before it was recorded, or because a sale left through the till without touching the stock system.
That is the whole failure model. The product is built around it: receive at the door, record movements as they happen, count blind, and let the review explain the gaps.
Receive at the door, not at the desk
Open the delivery where the boxes are. Scan the barcode or search the name, enter the quantity, choose Receive. The on-hand changes at once and the movement records who received it, on which device, at what time. If the stockroom has no signal, the receipt waits in the outbox and the home screen says how many changes are pending.
A short delivery is not an exception to hide. Record what actually arrived; if you ordered 24 and 22 came, receive 22 and note the shortfall with the supplier. The next count will otherwise blame the shelf for a supplier's mistake.
Products without a barcode are the normal case in a small shop. Print a Code128 label from the app for the shelf or the item, or search by name during the count. Labelling the twenty fastest movers is usually enough to make the count twice as fast.
Count what moves, weekly
A full stocktake once a month is a good habit, but the count that changes behaviour is the short one: ten to twenty fast movers, once a week, blind. It takes ten minutes, it catches the delivery that was never recorded while the delivery note is still in the bin, and it keeps the reorder list honest.
The count is blind by default. A line you cannot reach stays empty and keeps its current stock; the review says how many lines were uncounted, so nobody can quietly turn a blind spot into a zero. Submit once; if the connection drops and you retry, the count's own id makes the retry a duplicate rather than a second stocktake.
Keep the full count for the end of the month and the cycle count for the fast movers. Thecycle-counting guide has the four-week schedule.
The ledger is the retail advantage
Every change is a movement, not an overwritten number: received 12, sold 1, adjusted −2 for damage, counted 9. When the shelf disagrees with the book, the history tells you which event is missing. That is the difference between a shop that fixes its process and a shop that adjusts the number until it looks right.
The ledger also answers the question a staff member asks most often: "did anyone receive this?" Open the item, read the last movement, and the name and time are there.
Reorder from a minimum, not a feeling
Set a minimum on the items you reorder. The reorder list shows everything at or below it and suggests a top-up of twice the minimum minus what is on hand — a simple rule that covers a supplier lead time without a forecast. Edit the quantity before you order; group the list by supplier; copy it into an email or a message.
On Pro, the list can become a draft purchase order per supplier, sent and then received in part when the delivery arrives. If you do not run purchase orders, the list and the copy button are enough.
What a retail shop does not need
You do not need a warehouse management system, bin locations or a demand-forecasting model to run a 700-SKU shop. You need a count you trust and a ledger that explains it. You also do not need per-item pricing: our Starter plan is $19 a month with unlimited items, because a shop's catalogue grows and the bill should not.
What we do not do yet
No item photos, no per-row label printing on the web (labels are a phone-app action), no multi-counter sheets with per-line "counted by", and no two-way sync with a webshop or accounting package. If those are central to your retail operation, the comparison pages say which product does them better.
A first week
- Import the catalogue from your spreadsheet or add the first twenty items.
- Print labels for the ten fastest movers.
- Receive the next delivery at the door, on the phone.
- Count the fast movers blind on Sunday and read the review before submitting.
- Set minimums on the twenty items you reorder most; the list does the rest.