Eight inventory mistakes small businesses keep making

After a while, every stock problem starts to look like another one you have seen. The names change, the products change, the stockroom has a different smell, but the shape of the mistake is familiar. Here are the eight we see most, in roughly the order you will run into them.

1. Not counting deliveries

The box says 24. The box was packed by a person in a hurry. If you do not open it and count, you are trusting a stranger's mood on a Friday. The fix is a two-minute count at the door, against the order. A receiving checklist for every delivery has the full routine.

2. Trusting the sheet more than the shelf

A record is a claim about the shelf, not the shelf itself. When they disagree, the shelf is right. Count the items that matter regularly, and the sheet will earn its trust back.

3. One rule for every item

'Reorder at 10' sounds sensible, and it is wrong for nearly every item. A fast mover with a slow supplier needs a much higher trigger than a slow mover with a quick one. Set reorder points for your top items, using actual daily use and actual lead time.

4. Hiding losses

A broken pallet gets quietly thrown away, and nobody writes it off, because nobody wants to explain. Weeks later the count is short and nobody knows why. Record every write-off with a reason. A visible loss is a lesson, and a hidden one is a mystery.

5. Two homes for one item

Wood glue lives on shelf B, and also in a box under the counter, because it was convenient once. Now it has two counts, and nobody has both. Give every item one home, and treat overflow as a temporary exception you write down.

When an item lives in two places, someone will count only one of them.

6. Ordering what is already coming

Two people notice the same low shelf, and both place an order. The cause is not carelessness. It is that the purchase order lives in someone's inbox. Keep open orders in one place everyone can read.

7. Never looking at the slow stuff

Fast items shout, and slow items whisper. Once a quarter, sort your items by last sale and look at the bottom of the list. The cash trapped in dead stock is often worth more than a month of profit.

8. Buying software before fixing the habits

Software is a multiplier. It makes a good routine faster and a bad one faster too. If your item list has duplicates and your receiving is rushed, a new tool will faithfully store the mess. Clean the list and settle the routine first, and the software will pay for itself far sooner.