Planning for inventory stock count is very dependable on inventory type and locations. If it’s just one warehouse and only similar type of goods, it’s more or less easy. You can do it in one day and be done with it.

However, in case there are various locations and / or different types of inventory, it’s more complicated. There more you have locations, there more you have to consider your teams in general – i.e. different for each location – and if not different, then on which days are the counts done. Moreover, in case of various types of goods the teams may need to be different because some are more experienced in one type and not the other. It may also be that not everything can be counted on one day. Or it may even be so that it’s not humanly possible to count everything on one day. There are quite a few things to consider and as such you need to plan them ahead.

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When performing the stock count, people doing it need to be able to write down the amounts they have counted. While writing essentially isn’t a problem, a few things need to be kept in mind when dealing with sheets the results are written onto.

Since you want the whole process to be as fair and correct as possible, your count sheets should include as minimal information as possible. However, depending on the type of inventory, there may be couple of specifics you want to consider on the counting sheets.

When there are different types of inventory in stock, you might want to put the unit type on the count sheet – i.e. pieces, boxes, kilograms, tons, meters etc. This way you ensure that the persons counting the stock do know in which units it should be counted.

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With owning inventory comes also the responsibility to confirm its existence and obviously also the fact if everything in storage is also accounted for on the balance sheet. The way to do it is to perform stock counts every now and then. Depending on the stock level (i.e. how many items there are) and also the turnover and nature of the goods, it may be that stock counts are done on monthly basis or only once a year.

Normally in large production companies with thousands of items on their stock listing the stock counts are done more frequently than in companies with minimal stock. Also the lower the stock turnover the less frequent are stock counts obviously. As a general rule, the stock count needs to be done at least once a year and close to the end of the financial year.

The reason behind this is that you want to be sure of the stock levels on your annual financial statements so hence the closest date you pick to the financial year end, the better.

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Companies with stock struggle daily with appropriate stock levels – they need to ensure enough items are in stock to satisfy the customers and on the other hand make sure any article isn’t just piling up and ageing in the warehouse. The stock levels need to be optimized, but how to best achieve this?

There are two things we have found to work best in practice – regular review and responsibility.

What we mean with ‘regular review’ is really a weekly or a monthly (essentially as often as needed and reasonable in your industry) meeting where the stock levels are compared with sales, new minimum stock levels determined, action plans decided for slow moving goods etc. With this the stock levels are under a constant monitoring and provided that warehouse responsible personnel as well as sales and management team is involved, proper actions are decided and taken.

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For numerous reasons – no space of your own to storage goods, outsourcing efficient and top of the line storage service, unwillingness to deal with storage maintenance and related equipment and services on your own – whatever the reason may be, there are types of goods and types of companies who use outsourced service to storage their goods and materials.

Whilst this saves you more space, time and almost certainly inventory dealings like handling, shipping etc, there are still a couple of things you should be aware of when having inventory held by third parties.

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