How to keep your shop stock right without counting all day

Keeping stock right is not about counting everything. It is about recording each purchase the day it lands, watching the twenty items you cannot run out of instead of all four hundred, and counting one shelf a week. Ten quiet minutes, and your shelf and your register start telling the same story.

Why the shelf and the register disagree

Your register only hears about one way goods leave the shop: a sale. They actually leave in six or seven ways.

A bottle slips off the counter. A customer opens a sachet to smell it. Your nephew takes a packet of biscuits upstairs. Two cartons go back to the supplier because the date was short. A delivery lands at 7:20pm in the middle of the rush and nobody writes it down.

Each one is small. Put a month of them together and the shelf says twelve while the register says nineteen. Nobody is lying. The record simply never heard about the other five.

Three numbers, not one

Every shop is really tracking three things:

• What you bought. Goods in, at the rate you actually paid.
• What you sold. Goods out, at the rate the customer paid.
• What is actually on the shelf. The only one you can touch.

Bought minus sold should equal what is there. When it does not, that gap is information, not a failure: it tells you where your goods go when nobody is watching.

Write the purchase the minute the goods land

Imran runs a kirana shop in a narrow gali. The supplier van comes on Tuesday evenings, always during the rush. He signs the bill, folds it into the drawer and tells himself he will enter it later. By Friday the drawer holds four bills, one soaked in oil.

Ask him what a carton of tea cost him this month and he honestly does not know. He knows roughly. Roughly is what eats a shop.

The fix takes two minutes, while the cartons are still on the floor. Record the purchase: supplier, date, every item, the quantity, the rate you paid. Rs 18,400 goes in as one entry and the shelf count rises by itself. If the goods came on credit, the supplier's balance moves at the same moment, so you never pay one bill twice. A products and stock ledger does the adding for you, but a ruled copy does the same job, as long as you fill it that night and not on Friday.

Twenty items, not four hundred

Most shops carry hundreds of lines and earn most of their money on a few dozen. Do not set a minimum level for everything. Pick the items you would be embarrassed to run out of, the ones people ask for by name: the tea, the cooking oil, the milk pack, the shampoo sachet everybody wants, the AA batteries. Twenty is plenty to start.

For each one the level is simple arithmetic: what you sell while the supplier is away, plus a cushion. If you sell 6 packs a day and the van comes every 5 days, that is 30, so set the level at 40. The day the count drops under 40, that item goes on the order list. No thinking, no memory, no "I think we are running out".

Fast movers, dead stock, and what dead stock really costs

Now look at the other end of the shop: the corner that has not moved since last Eid.

The same Rs 5,000 on two different shelves

Fast moverDead stock

Your moneyFast moverBack in the till in about ten daysDead stockStill on the shelf after fourteen months

Shelf spaceFast moverEarns its place every weekDead stockBlocks a line that would sell

ConditionFast moverLeaves the shop long before its dateDead stockPacket fades, the date creeps closer

What to do nextFast moverSet a low-stock level and reorder on timeDead stockCut the rate, bundle it, do not reorder

What it teaches youFast moverWhich goods your street actually wantsDead stockWhich supplier talked you into a carton

That corner costs more than it looks. It is not only profit you did not earn, it is money you already handed a supplier, sitting still for a year while the packets fade and the dates run out.

Suppose: Rs 40,000 of stock that did not move for a year

What the goods cost youRs 40,000

Recovered a year later at a cut rateRs 26,000

Loss on the goods themselvesRs 14,000

Profit the same money would have made in fast moversRs 20,000

What that one corner cost you for the yearRs 34,000

An example, not real shop data. Put your own slow-moving goods on the same four lines.

Do not wait for dead stock to sell at full price. It will not. Cut the rate and say so on a card. Bundle it with something fast. Ask the supplier whether he takes returns or exchanges, because many do. Taking Rs 700 for something that cost Rs 1,000 hurts for one afternoon. Holding it for another year hurts quietly, every day. For the full picture of what your shop earns, work out your real profit with these numbers inside it.

Count one shelf a week

Farah keeps a cosmetics and general store. For years she closed the shop for a whole day before Eid and counted everything with her brother. It ended in arguments, and by evening the early numbers were wrong anyway, because the shop had reopened while they counted.

Now she counts one shelf every Monday before eleven, while the bazaar is still slow. Four Mondays cover the whole shop, and nothing ever closes.

Ten minutes on Monday morning

• Pick one shelf. Next week, take the next one.
• Count what is on it, once, out loud.
• Compare the count with your record.
• Fix the number and write the reason for the gap.
• Check your twenty low-stock items.
• Write one order list for the supplier.
• Name one item that has not moved in three months.

One rule makes this worth doing: when the count is wrong, write down why, not only the new number. If the face cream says nine and there are seven, changing it to seven fixes today. Writing "two broken inside the box" fixes next year.

Your buy rate is your profit

Rs 40,000 of sales in a day means nothing on its own. It might be Rs 6,000 of profit or Rs 1,500, and the whole difference is the rate you paid.

Buy rates move: the same box costs Rs 60 more this month than it did in March. So record the rate on the purchase itself, every time, and let each sale carry the rate you actually paid. That one habit turns your day's total from a number into an answer.

Two cautions. Your buy rate is your business, not the counter boy's, so if staff use the shop's phone or app, keep the rate and the profit behind a permission. And when goods go out on udhaar, the profit only becomes real the day the money comes back, which is a separate job with its own steady routine.

Breakage, samples and the packet you took home

These three leaks are the ones no register catches, because no money moves.

Give each one a name and a line. "Breakage" when the bottle falls. "Sample" when somebody tries. "House use" when you carry the biscuits upstairs. It takes five seconds, and it is not about blame. At the end of the month you may find that house use was Rs 3,200. You are not going to stop feeding your family. You simply stop wondering where seven items went.

Common questions

I have four hundred items. Where do I even start?

Start with the twenty that pay your rent. Enter those today with a count and a buy rate, then add the rest as they get reordered, one purchase at a time. A stock list you try to type in a single night is usually abandoned by page three.

How often should I count?

One shelf a week, and the full shop once or twice a year. Small costly things that fit in a pocket, razors, batteries, memory cards, deserve a quick count every week.

My count and my record never match exactly. Is something broken?

No. Small gaps are normal in a shop with people in it. Watch the size and the direction instead. One or two missing on a fast item is noise. The same item short every week is a story worth following.

Should I track the Rs 5 items too?

Only if you want reorder help on them. Toffees, matchboxes and loose sachets are usually better tracked by the carton than by the piece. Detail you will not maintain is worse than no detail.

What do I do with goods that have not moved in a year?

Assume today is the best price you will ever get, because next year they are worth less. Cut the rate, bundle them, or send them back if the supplier allows it. Then write down why you bought them, so the same box does not arrive again.

Can my salesman handle stock without seeing my rates?

Yes, if your record keeps rates separate from counts. Let him add sales and shelf counts while the buy rate and the profit stay behind a permission. He gets the work he needs, and your margins stay yours.

Wasoolo keeps products, stock, suppliers and khata in one place and is free to download. If your stock list lives in a copy or an Excel sheet, ask us and we will help you bring it in.