Questions we are asked

Is this not just cycle counting?

Cycle counting is the genus, and saying so is the honest place to start. Counting a rolling subset rather than the whole catalogue at once is long established.

The claim is four things about it: which lines are selected and on what basis, that it runs every working day rather than periodically, that a difference cannot be closed without a stated cause, and that what results is an auditable record rather than an adjustment.

Why not simply count everything more often?

Because a full count is an expensive instrument, which is why it is used rarely, and rarity is what makes it blind to causes. The constraint is not willingness. It is that the instrument does not scale to a frequency that would make it useful.

Twenty lines a day, six days a week, is 6,240 line checks a year in one shop. A full count of a 616-line book gives 616.

How are the lines chosen?

By what a line is worth, how fast it has been selling, and what its own history of discrepancies looks like. Lines that have been wrong before come round sooner; lines counted recently and found right come round later.

Nobody in the shop chooses them, which is the point. The weighting itself is the one thing we discuss under an agreement rather than in a document.

Does that leave slow-moving stock unchecked?

It is looked at rarely rather than never, and that is the correct allocation of a fixed twenty minutes.

Value sits in the selection alongside rate of sale precisely so that an expensive line which barely moves still earns attention. The two criteria diverge in exactly that case, and the weighting exists for it.

Does it really fit in twenty minutes?

Twenty minutes is the target for a clean session. A session with differences takes longer, because explaining a difference is part of the work rather than an exception to it.

The session runs before the doors open, when nothing is moving. A difference found while stock is in motion is not yet a difference.

Who does it, and does it need a specialist?

Whoever is already on shift, on a phone that already exists. No supervisor, no auditor, no visit, and no new hire. It runs inside hours you already pay for.

What stops somebody closing a session without explaining anything?

The session will not close. Most inventory platforms can record an adjustment and most have a field for a reason, but a field is optional and a gate is not.

The reason is chosen by the person who looked, never suggested by the system, because a reason that was offered and accepted is not evidence of anything.

How many false alarms will it raise?

At a threshold of 1.35 times the comparable rate sustained over two consecutive periods, the rule caught 83% of planted decay and flagged 3.7% of healthy lines. Those figures come from synthetic books where the answer was known by construction, not from anybody's shop.

How much work that 3.7% represents depends on how many healthy lines a book holds, which is why the settings belong to the retailer rather than shipping as a default.

Does it replace our annual stocktake?

No. That count answers an audit question: what the position was, on a date, to a standard somebody else sets. It should stay.

What it cannot produce is the accuracy an operation runs on, and asking it for both is the error. What changes is that the year-end variance arrives already explained, line by line, with a date and a name against each one.

Does it track or score the people counting?

No, and that is a design decision rather than an omission. Nothing in the record ranks one person against another and nothing is measured per person per line.

A signature says who looked, so that a question can be asked later. It identifies a witness, never a culprit, and the method depends on the people counting having no reason to make the record anything other than true.

Will it tell us what to buy, or stop things going missing?

Neither. It holds no view about what will sell, and it is not a security system.

What it can do is separate a difference that was found in the wrong place from one that was never found. Those are different problems with different remedies, and a single annual variance figure cannot tell them apart.

What does it connect to?

Nothing. It reads a stock file you export and sits alongside whatever you already run. Nothing is connected to your point of sale, nothing is migrated and nothing is replaced.

There is no implementation project, no discovery phase and no new hardware. If you stop, your systems are exactly as they were.

What does it cost?

Per location, per month, in bands by the number of lines in your stock file. No implementation fee, no professional-services line and no minimum term beyond a month.

You already know what you pay a stocktaking firm each year and how many locations it covers. The subtraction is one line, and we would rather you did it than hear a figure from us.