TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- What kinds of stocktake can I perform?
- Preparing for your stocktake
- How do I complete a stocktake?
- Selling stock items during a stocktake
Introduction
To ensure that your stock on hand matches the stock you have recorded in the system, you should perform stocktakes at regular intervals (e.g monthly).
During a stocktake, you and your staff count and record each item in your store. You will then complete a stocktake adjustment in IBIS, to ensure that your actual count is reflected in the system. When you have completed your stock take adjustment, you can easily see reports on variances in your stock levels, including costs.
Stocktakes help you to keep on top of your inventory movements and identify discrepancies faster and are a very important part of stock management.
What kinds of stocktake can I perform?
Completing regular stocktakes ensures your end-of-year inventory count runs more smoothly. There are two types of stocktake you can perform:
Full stocktake: These are generally completed at the end of the financial year to provide your accountant with the exact value of your stock on hand. It includes every item you have. It is recommended a full stocktake should be completed outside of usual trading hours to ensure you get an accurate 'snapshot' of your stock levels.
Partial stocktake: You can count a small section of your inventory, usually a particular supplier or item group, at any time. A partial stocktake can more easily be completed during regular trading hours and they are designed to keep your stock accurate throughout the year. You can run partial stocktakes at the same time, just ensure you don't have the same item in more than one adjustment).
Preparing for your stocktake
Your system stock levels must be accurate before you complete your stocktake. Purchase orders must be completed if your stock has been put out for sale on your shelves. If you have any damaged stock, ensure that these have been adjusted out of your system before your stocktake and accurately accounted for as damaged goods.
How do I complete a stocktake?
Stocktakes are very easy to manage in IBIS. You can use a stocktake report to give you a checklist of items to count. Once your count is complete, you can adjust the actual stock count as required. Follow the steps below to complete your stocktake:
Under the Stock menu, click Stock Reports then select Stocktake Report.
When the report opens, select your desired filters and groupings and click Refresh to generate the report. You can choose whether to display the current stock count on the report or not.
Physically count the items for each retail location, and write down the actual number in the Count column on the report.
If there is a discrepancy between the system count and the actual count, note this in the Adjustment column on the report. Check any discrepancies carefully to ensure no mistakes are made. If you have incomplete purchase orders (e.g. you have not completed a purchase order before putting the stock out for sale) this can cause a discrepancy.
Once your count is complete, open the Adjustment screen.
Select the correct Retail Location then click Refresh
Add items to your adjustment using the Select items function OR you can add items individually by clicking + to add new rows. You can use the select items function more than once to keep adding more items to your adjustment - this is very useful if you want to enter your stocktake by supplier or item groups.
When items are added to the adjustment, your current stock on hand shows in the Old stock column. You can enter your actual count directly into the New stock column (this is the only option if you have not shown the system stock on your stocktake sheet) or you can enter the variance directly into the Adjust units column.
Once you have completed entering your counts for all items, ensure the adjustment type is set to Stocktake so you can identify why this adjustment was done and enter any notes. The date will be set to current automatically when the adjustment is saved.
If desired, you can also perform the following under the Functions button:
Remove any items (rows) where the current stock = 0
Remove any rows which have not been adjusted
When you are finished, change the status to Completed, then click Save to post the changes to your stock ledger.
Selling stock items during a stocktake
If you are going to be operating during your stocktake, you will need to account for items that are sold throughout the day. You can update the current units on the Adjustment screen by finding the sold item within the grid, then clicking the row and hitting enter to update the current stock on hand, then amend the units as required.
You will need to take care in making the correct adjustments for sales as they occur. It is no good to run a sales report at the end of the day for items sold during the day as items may have been sold before the count is completed and then sold again after. Example:
- I have 7 magnets in stock. I sell 2 in the morning.
- I count the magnets for my stocktake and correctly count 5.
- I then sell another 3 magnets during the day.
- At the end of the day I run my Sales report and it tells me I sold 5 magnets, so I change my count to 0 in the stocktake adjustment grid to compensate.
- When I commit the stocktake, my stock level will be 0, but I started with 7 and sold only 5 so I still have 2 magnets in stock.
This is wrong and demonstrates why it is important to account for sales of stock as they happen. Note this also applies to refunds. The alternative to this is not to process sales during the stocktake.