Counting Your Stock After the Holidays, Without the Headache

By Vladislav Gerasimchuk, founder of Extensions Market, which builds EZstock

After the holidays, the stock numbers in Shopify and the stock on your shelves often don't quite match. A return didn't get put back, a box got damaged in the rush, a sale was typed in twice. A quick count puts that right, and it often turns up money you forgot you had: stock you can sell in your January sale.

Why count after the holidays?

December is busy, and busy weeks leave small mix-ups behind. If Shopify thinks you have 10 of something and the shelf holds 6, you can sell items you can't send. When it holds 14, you have stock you could be selling, and you might even reorder it when you don't need to.

A count also tells you what's left over from the holidays, so you can plan a January sale before that stock gets older.

Your accountant will also want to know how much stock you had on December 31, if that's when your business year ends.

Step 1: Pick a quiet day

Choose a day between Christmas and your January sale, when orders are slow. Early morning or after closing works well too.

Does your year end on December 31? Then count as close to that day as you can. Counting a few days later is fine: keep a note of what sold in between, so you can work back to the December 31 number.

Step 2: Get the shop ready

Tidy up a little first. It saves a lot of recounting:

• Put away every delivery that has arrived, so new boxes don't get skipped or counted twice.
• Returns go back on the shelf, or into a separate pile if they can't be sold.
• Keep damaged items in one separate box, so you can deal with them after.
• Pause sales for an hour while you count, if you can, or count when the shop is closed.

Step 3: Count one shelf at a time

Use a printed list of your products with an empty column for the count, or your phone. Start at one end of the shop and work through it shelf by shelf. Count, write the number down, move on.

With a helper it goes faster: one of you counts, the other writes.

Count any product again if its number looks far off, before moving on. And count the stock that lives outside the shop too: the back room, your car, the box you take to markets.

Step 4: Fix the numbers in Shopify

Shopify now has its own stock counts. In your Shopify admin, go to Inventory, then Stock counts, choose a location and the products to count, and enter what you found or scan the barcodes. When you approve the count, Shopify changes your stock by the difference and keeps a record of each change.

Counting apps do the same job, often with a printed count sheet and phone scanning.

Whichever you use, update Shopify the same day, while the count is fresh.

Step 5: Turn what you found into money

Then put what you found to work:

• Stock you forgot about: list it again, feature it on your home page, or add it to a January email to your customers.
• Slow sellers: put them in a January sale, or bundle them with a best seller so both sell.
• Damaged items: sell them as seconds at a lower price, donate them, or write them off.
• Items that keep going missing: look at how they're stored or packed, and fix the cause before your next busy season.
• Best sellers running low: reorder now, while your supplier is quiet, so you're ready for spring.

What to give your accountant

Your accountant usually wants one number: the value of your stock on the last day of your year. The math is simple: what each product cost you, times how many you have. Forty candles that cost you $6 each and 20 gift boxes at $15 come to $540. Shopify's Month-end inventory value report does this for you. It multiplies each product's cost per item by the stock you had at the end of the month.

That report only counts products that have a cost per item, so fill in any missing costs before the end of December.

Keep your count sheets too, in case your accountant has questions.

How EZstock helps

EZstock's stocktakes are made for counts like this one:

• Print a count sheet with every product and its SKU
• Type counts on your phone as you go, and save your progress
• Scan barcodes with your phone or a scanner on the Growth plan
• When you finish, EZstock updates Shopify for you. If something sold while you were counting, it tells you instead of overwriting the sale

Stocktakes come with the Starter plan ($19 a month) and up, and every new store gets all features free for 14 days. On the Growth plan ($49 a month), the Stock On Hand report shows the cost value of your stock and exports it to Excel for your accountant.