For boutiques, provisions stores and anyone counting by hand
How to keep stock straight in a small shop
Reorder levels, dead stock, cost against price, and how to keep a count that stays true when you sell in more than one place.
Start here
Counting is not the goal. Deciding is.
Stock control sounds like tidiness and it is not. The point of knowing what you have is that it lets you answer two questions: what to buy next, and which lines are worth the shelf space. Everything else is bookkeeping.
That is worth saying because it tells you how much effort to spend. A perfect count nobody acts on is wasted work.
The order to do it in
Four steps, and the first one is the hardest
Write down what you have, once, properly
Name, how many, what you paid, what you sell it for. The cost is the field everyone skips and the one that makes the rest useful.
Set a reorder level on the lines you run out of
Not every line. The fifty that actually sell. A threshold on a line that turns over twice a year tells you nothing.
Update it as you sell, not on Sundays
A count updated weekly is wrong for six days out of seven. This is the step where a tool starts to earn its place.
Look at what has not moved
Once a month is enough. Dead stock is capital already spent, sitting still, and it never shows up as a loss until you write it off.
The two mistakes
What going wrong looks like
Running out
- Today
- You find out from an empty shelf
- With TAB
- A customer buys it somewhere else
Sometimes permanently. This is the expensive mistake and the one nobody records.
Over-buying
- Today
- A good deal from a supplier
- With TAB
- Cash stuck on a shelf for a year
The cheaper mistake, but it compounds: capital in dead stock is capital you cannot spend on what sells.
Selling in three places
- Today
- Counter, chat and link, three counts
- With TAB
- The same item promised twice
The failure that arrives the moment you start selling online, and the one a notebook cannot fix.
Not knowing margin
- Today
- Your bestseller by volume
- With TAB
- Possibly your worst by profit
Without cost on the item you are optimising for the wrong number.
Spreadsheet or software
A spreadsheet is fine until it is not
A spreadsheet handles a few hundred lines perfectly well, and it is free. What it cannot do is update itself as you sell, which means it is accurate on the day you touch it and drifting every day after.
The threshold is the same as everywhere else in this guide: when you sell in more than one place, or when checking takes long enough that you stop checking. Before that, use the spreadsheet and spend the difference on stock.
Where TAB fits
One mention, then you can go
TAB keeps one stock record underneath the counter, the chat and your storefront, with cost and a reorder level on each line, and names dead stock in a morning report. If you are still at one counter and a spreadsheet, you do not need it yet, and we would rather say so.
Think TAB might help?
Tell us what you run and we will say plainly whether it fits, including when it does not.
More guides
For anyone already selling in the chat
How to sell on WhatsApp without losing track of orders
Read the guideFor shops, restaurants and anyone paying terminal rent
How to take card payments without renting a POS machine
Read the guide