Inventory count sheet

Count in cost, not in units. Six missing shirts is a shrug; €114,90 of missing stock, repeated across a catalogue, is a real line in a real month. Value the variance at cost rather than at retail, because stock is money spent, not revenue lost, and pricing it that way puts it in the same units as everything else on the statement.

Locations matter more than most stores expect. Stock reserved for a wholesale order, units sitting on the returns bench and anything in a second warehouse are all real and none of them can be sold to the next customer, so counting them into one number is how a well-stocked product goes out of stock. The same logic underlies stock coverage, which is only honest when it counts saleable units.

Count often and narrowly rather than annually and completely. A rolling count of the fastest twenty SKUs every month finds problems while they are still small and costs an hour; a full annual count finds them a year late. Price each variance at the landed cost of the unit, not at what it would have sold for, and whatever the count says, the counted number wins: an inventory system that disagrees with the shelf is wrong by definition.