Tips for Accurate and Effective Stocktaking in Your Retail Store

Proper stocktaking is a crucial step in increasing your retail store's profitability. It helps uncover discrepancies in your stock, primarily due to theft from employees. Stocktaking also increases profits by helping reduce dead stock and waste. By evaluating your opening and closing stock, you can examine a product's performance and determine whether to keep selling it. However, for you to realise the benefits of stocktaking, you need to observe these four essentials.

Choose the Right Time for Stocktaking

When running a retail store, you cannot afford to disrupt operations by stocktaking during the busiest days of the month. Therefore, schedule the task for the less-busy days or outside business hours to prevent disruptions. Doing this will also allow you to involve your employees for faster stocktaking. Plan ahead, organise workers into groups and pre-determine what each group should count to avoid having double-counted or uncounted stock.

Mark Counted Goods

Double-counting is a common problem during stocktaking, and it undermines the results of the process. The information you gather presents your stock as more than what you have, and this can affect the accuracy of your profit projections. What's more, you may run out of stock while assuming you still have enough. Therefore, avoid double-counting by marking all the counted goods. You can label boxes as "counted" or store them separately from the uncounted stock. 

Don't Rely on Box Labels

Labels can be deceiving, and relying on them can lead to inaccurate stock data. For example, if a box claims to have 20 items, don't just believe the label. Open it and count the goods inside before recording the number. Some boxes may have less than the indicated number due to manufacturer error. In this case, you will end up accounting for more stock than what you have in your store.

Put Together Essential Data

Stocktaking is not just about counting items. You need to derive data from the process as well. Some essential information to put together includes the following:

• Items with a high turnover rate
• Products with a high number of dead stock
• Comparison between existing inventory data and the actual number of physical goods

This information should help you plan for proper stock control. Identify areas you can improve and those that require attention. For example, if there are considerable discrepancies between inventory data and physical stock, you should consider the possibilities of theft in your business. Take steps to reduce or curtail such practices. Similarly, if a product has a high turnover rate, you can increase deliveries or quantities to prevent a stockout.

Proper stocktaking calls for accuracy and transparency. Consider investing in automated inventory management solutions for better stock control and management.

To learn more, contact a company that provides stocktaking solutions.