Physical Stock Take Software

A physical stock take, or physical inventory, is the process of counting or measuring the stock at a company’s location or sub-location. The stock quantities from a stock take are known as quantity on hand, as they represent the quantity physically present, independent of whether the items have been reserved for future sales.

Just a little while ago the only way to do a physical inventory count for small businesses was by using paper and pencil. Employees had to go wall to wall and record all inventory counts manually, either by finding the right item on the inventory count sheets, or by recording item information on a blank form. Needless to say, this method isn’t effective or efficient as there are several issues.

It takes a lot of time to record inventory information manually, or to look for each item on the pre-printed inventory sheets. It is also prone to making mistakes, double counting some items and missing others entirely. Verification counts often do not match, and paper notes are misplaced or lost, resulting in multiple re-counts of the same area. Finally, all notes have to be manually entered into a computer – another tedious and daunting task prone to errors.

Previously small business had little choice. The alternative to manual count – using barcode scanners or mobile computers linked to a local computer network – requires initial investment not feasible to a small business.

Now, new technologies allow businesses of any size to use barcode scanning for physical inventory count and send data directly from a smartphone to the cloud, eliminating manual entries, there is no reason to continue doing inventory counts manually.  Many advanced inventory management system leverage a barcode scanner to improve the efficiency of the physical stock take by scanning barcode labels.

Stock takes are a frequent operation for retail and e-commerce businesses. One of the major selling points of a cloud inventory software system like Finale is that stock takes are efficient to take and consistent because records are kept in a single location.

Physical stock take with mobile barcode scanner

Data is normally transmitted from the wireless barcode scanner to Finale via WiFi. If the warehouse does not have a WiFi access point or the WiFi is intermittent, the data can be synced by docking the scanning and syncing via USB.

Physical stock take without mobile barcode scanner

Video Transcription:

Hello, this is Shaquille with Finale Inventory. In this short video, we’ll be demonstrating how to conduct a Stock Take, commonly known as a Cycle Count in finale inventory.

Since a Stock Take is an inventory procedure on our homepage, we can find Stock Takes under our inventory section. We can also find it under our navigation panel under inventory and Stock Takes. From here I can see all my existing stock takes and I can control that by the filters. But if I want to create a new Stock Take, I’d click create Stock Take. I would select a sublocation that I want to take the Stock Take. I’m going to select, in this example my A1 sub location.

Now I have a list of all the products within that sublocation. Now I don’t want a Stock Take taken against my entire A1 sublocation. I’m just going to filter it for my Seltzer items. Now I’m going to conduct a Stock Take against those items. Essentially what a stock tank really is, is your physical observation of your inventory. So I’m going to go through my inventory warehouse now and I’m going to record what I observed these items to have a physical inventory count of. I observed that there were 50 units in my original Seltzer, 200 units. 200 and lastly I had 190.

Now we can see a couple of things. Now we have a variance for these items. Finale is recording that there’s a difference between what we observed and what the inventory numbers actually are. And that’s recorded and you can detail any reason for that, that you might have, fully customizable .You may add what reasons you have if they’re not already on this list.

Once we complete the Stock Take and we save changes here, finale is going to record this and make these changes once the Stock Take has been committed. So your inventory numbers will reflect what you observed, and it will record why that observation or why that change was made within your stock history so that this information is forever recorded under your finale stock history.

With this, we’ve completed our demonstration on what a Stock Take looks like in Finale Inventory. Thank you for viewing our video demonstration on Stock Takes. If you have any questions or concerns regarding how to conduct a Stock Take with Finale Inventory, feel free to reach out to us at service@finaleinventory.com with any questions or concerns.