What's running out, without counting the stock

The moment you notice is always the same: a customer asks for something you thought you had, you go and check, and it is not there. The sale is lost, and almost never over price — it is lost because you did not know you were at zero.

Why almost nobody does a proper stocktake

Because it costs. Counting everything takes a closing, a calm moment and a person who is not needed elsewhere: three things that do not exist on busy days. So the stocktake gets done at the start of the season, then put off, and meanwhile the real number and the number in your head drift apart.

The mistake is not putting it off. The mistake is thinking the only alternative to counting nothing is counting everything.

The middle way

Counting is only needed where running out does damage. A short list of simple rules:

• items you sell every day: worth counting, because they run out with no warning;
• slow but expensive ones: worth it, because reordering takes time;
• ones you can buy again in half an hour round the corner: not worth it;
• services, or whatever you make to order: nothing to count.

Counting twenty per cent of the items covers almost every case where running short turns into a lost sale.

The threshold, not the number

Knowing four are left is no use on its own. What is useful is knowing that four is few, and that judgement changes item by item: four packs of water is nothing, four cameras is a full storeroom.

That is why the useful thing is not the count but the threshold: the number below which that item needs reordering. It is the only figure that turns a count into a reminder.

How it works in Yataio

Counting units is optional: if you sell services or keep the stock in your head, you skip it entirely and items stay a price list with photos.

If you want it, the item record has four controls:

• Deduct units sold, the switch that turns it all on: from then on every document takes units out of stock;
• Units in stock, how many you have right now;
• Alert threshold, the number below which the item becomes «running low»;
• Do not sell at zero, to stop it being sold once it is finished.

When an item drops below the threshold it changes colour in the list and appears on the Home screen, among the things waiting for you. You do not have to go looking: it is in front of you the first time you open the app. It is a feature of the free version.

The detail of the four controls is in the guide. If the problem is instead the time between a customer's request and the document going out, I wrote about that in orders arriving over chat.