Counting the shop floor and the backroom on the same day

On a Saturday afternoon the store is full. The counting team is counting 12 Roma sofas in the backroom when a customer picks a sofa on the floor and pays, and a member of staff brings two sofas from the backroom to the floor. The same two sofas were counted first in the backroom and will now be counted again on the floor. This is the basic problem of counting while a store is open: goods change place during the count. This article explains how a cut-off time, a zone lock and a two-stage count prevent double counting.

First decide: closed or open?

There are three options:

• a closed count: the safest, but it costs sales;
• a count before opening or after closing: no lost sales, but longer hours for the team;
• a count while open: sales continue, but a strict rule on movements is needed.

A small store can be counted before opening. For an open store choose the quietest hours, such as weekday mornings. If there are many items and the store must stay open, the rules below become mandatory. Prepare in advance:

• number the floor zones in the order of racks and display units;
• keep tape, strips and a "count in progress" sign ready;
• print the movement form and give one pad each to the till and the backroom;
• tell sales staff only the movement rule, not the scope of the count.

Cut-off time and zone lock

Close the last receipts, issues and transfer slips before the count at a fixed time, and write this time in the report. Before it is counted, each zone is "locked": tape across the backroom door, a coloured strip on the shelves of that zone on the floor. A zone that has been counted gets a "counted" strip. If a locked zone must give up a product, the only way is to ask the team lead, who writes the item on a movement form.

A two-stage count

The backroom is counted first and then the sales floor, or the other way round, but the order is fixed in advance. Between the two stages a movement form is kept: item code, quantity, time, from which zone to which, and a signature. The person carrying the goods fills it in and the lead signs. The rule is this: an item is treated as counted in the zone where it was counted; an item that leaves a counted zone and enters one not yet counted is not added again in the second zone, because it is written on the form.

Example: the backroom count is finished and finds 12 Roma sofas. Then staff take 2 sofas from the backroom to the floor and a form is kept. The floor count finds 5 sofas, 2 of which are the ones on the form. The correct total is 12 + (5 − 2) = 15. Without the form it would be 12 + 5 = 17, and against 15 sofas in the record a false surplus of 2 units would appear.

Sales and goods ready for collection

List the sales made during the count by the time on the slip. If the record balance is taken at the cut-off time, the quantities sold during the count are either deducted from the record balance or added to the counted quantity; write down which you chose and apply it the same way in both zones. Collect goods that are sold but not yet taken by the customer on a separate rack with a "ready for collection" label, so that in the count both the rack and the slip agree. If a customer takes the goods during the count, that too is written on the movement form.

How to write up the results

The report should show the two zones on separate lines: backroom and floor. If the record holds location information and a product appears on the floor in the record but is found in the backroom in the count, that is not a quantity difference but a location difference, and it is classified separately. A location difference does not change total stock, but it has to be corrected so that a customer is not told "it is on the floor now".

In short

In a store count the real work is not counting the goods but keeping movement during the count under control. In store and branch stock audits StockSystem reviews transfer slips, returns and damage records, finds which movement caused the gap between the store and head-office records, and sets the count day around your calendar.