Counting every day and still missing stock

Plenty of stores do the right thing: they count a little every day. A category in the morning, the fast movers at cash-up, the shelf behind the counter on a quiet afternoon. The schedule says counted, every day, and it's true. But when you ask a different question - which products have actually been counted this week? - the answer is often uncomfortable.

Daily counting tends to gravitate to the same shelves. The products that sell fastest get counted constantly, and the slow ones at the back - often the expensive ones - can go a month without anyone looking at them. That is exactly where shrinkage hides, because nobody is measuring it.

Counted on schedule isn't the same as counted

Budstack now shows a third state between counted and overdue. A store counting on time but leaving products out shows gaps, with how much of the shelf was covered - for example 94 of 125 products this week - and the list of what was missed. Staff get a matching filter on the count sheet, Not counted this week, so the next count goes straight to the gaps, and their My day card tells them how many are left.

• The cycle is a week for daily and weekly schedules, a month for monthly ones
• Every kind of count covers a product - full stock takes, category counts and shelf counts at cash-up
• Only products actually on the shelf count towards it, so empty and archived lines don't make a store look behind
• It's information, not a lock - nothing stops a sale or a count

The other half: miscounts that look like theft

A count can also be wrong in the other direction. Someone types 55 instead of 5, or weighs a jar with its lid on, and the approval queue shows a dramatic shortage or surplus. The manager approving it has no way to tell a typo from missing stock - so either a real problem gets waved through, or a false one starts an investigation.

So before a count is sent, Budstack checks it. If a few products are far from what the system expects, the counter is asked to count those again - one at a time, with an empty box and without being shown the system number, so the second count is a real one. Getting the same number twice is fine; it confirms it. The approver then sees which lines were recounted and what the first count was.

Between the two, a stock take goes back to doing its actual job: measuring the whole shelf, regularly, with numbers a manager can trust enough to act on.