A 15-minute weekly check

Many people picture a stock count as a big event: once a year you close the shop, count everything and drag yourself home at night. During the other eleven months, mistakes quietly pile up, and by December nobody can say where the shortage came from. A weekly check solves this differently: a little, but often. On the same day each week you spend fifteen minutes counting your twenty most important items and comparing them with the balance in your table. An error is found a week after it happens, not a month or a year, so its cause is still easy to remember.

Why exactly 20 items

Twenty items fit into fifteen minutes: about forty seconds each, counting and writing included. Build the list from three parts rather than at random:

• the 10 fastest-selling items, where errors build up quickest;
• the 5 most expensive items, where even one missing unit hurts;
• the 5 items that showed a difference before, because problems tend to repeat.

Refresh the list once a month: drop items whose sales have slowed and add the new best-sellers.

Preparation: one sheet of paper

Print the list or copy it into a notebook in shelf order, otherwise you will walk around the shop floor twice. Columns: item, table balance, counted, difference, cause. Cover the table-balance column: count first, compare afterwards. A person who knows the expected number tends to "see" it. If the table says 18, you may count 18 even when only 17 are on the shelf.

How the fifteen minutes go

1. Minute one: sheet, pen, calculator. Close the computer and do not look at the records yet.
2. The next ten minutes: walk down the list and count. Write each number at once and do not trust your memory. If an item sits both on the shop floor and in the stockroom, count both places and write them separately.
3. The next three minutes: open the balances in your table and work out the differences.
4. The last minute: beside each difference write the probable cause in one word: "receipt", "return", "wrong place", "unknown".

If a customer walks off with an item while you are counting, note it on the edge of the sheet and allow for it at the end.

What to do when you find a difference

Recount first; often the goods simply stand on another shelf or in a box in the stockroom. Next, look through the last seven days of paperwork: what arrived, what came back, what was sold, and which of those is missing from the table. Only then correct the balance and write down the cause. Quietly fixing a number is the worst habit: the figure becomes right while the repeating error stays invisible. For items counted in pieces the expected difference is zero; for loose goods measured in kilograms or litres, a deviation of one or two percent is natural.

For example, washing powder shows 18 packs in the table but 16 on the shelf, and a recount still gives 16. The papers reveal that two packs went from the stockroom to a Telegram customer and the sale was never entered. You fix the balance and log "sale not entered". At month end, hunting for this would have taken an hour; now it took five minutes.

The rest of the range and repeating errors

Suppose the shop has another 120 ordinary items. Split them into four groups of 30 and add one group each week for ten more minutes: within a month you have covered the whole range.

Do not throw the filled-in sheets away; collect them as a difference log. If one item shows a difference three weeks in a row, it is not chance: the name is probably written two ways, units are mixed up or goods are counted wrongly at delivery. At the end of the month tally the causes, and start fixing with the one that appears most often.

Conclusion

A weekly check does not replace the big stock count, but it makes it far easier: no surprises are waiting at year end, because small deviations were fixed as soon as they appeared. If these fifteen minutes keep showing mismatches and you cannot find the cause yourself, the AniqHisob team can run a full stock count, put your records in order and set up monthly checks.