Stock control

Running a stocktake

Count your physical stock, understand what a variance means, and how it feeds back into your ingredient costs.

Running a stocktake

A stocktake compares what Stock thinks you have on hand against what's actually on your shelf, and lets you correct the difference.

Starting a count

Start a new stocktake from the Stocktakes screen. Work through your ingredients (or a filtered subset, if you're only counting one storage area) and enter the quantity you physically count for each. Stock records the count against what it currently believes you hold — see Understanding on-hand vs available stock for what "on hand" means here, since that's always the number a stocktake counts against, never the "available" figure.

Reading the variance

Once you finish a count, Stock shows you the variance for each ingredient — the difference between what you counted and what the system expected. A positive variance means you found more than expected; a negative variance means less. Small variances are normal (rounding, portioning, spillage); a large or repeated variance on the same ingredient is usually worth investigating — check whether that ingredient is properly mapped to every product and every modifier that uses it, since anything unmapped or under-mapped will show up here as unexplained loss. Milk and syrups are the usual culprits, because they're normally sold as modifiers rather than as part of the base product.

Finishing the stocktake

When you complete a stocktake, your counted quantities become the new on-hand figures for those ingredients. This is the one place in Stock where a person's count overrides the running total — everywhere else, on-hand moves automatically as orders are fulfilled.