Cycle count

Instead of closing the warehouse once a year to count everything, you count a few locations or products every day or week, so over the year every item is counted at least once, the busiest several times, and the work never stops. Fast sellers and valuable items are usually counted more often than slow, cheap ones. This way of counting is called a cycle count, or cycle counting.

Each count either confirms the system or finds a difference, and a difference is a prompt to find the cause: a mis-scan, a wrong shelf, a return nobody booked. Fix the cause and the same error stops recurring, which an annual count alone rarely achieves.

A simple plan: split your products into A, B and C by how much they matter (see ABC analysis), count the A group monthly, B quarterly and C once or twice a year. Which method your tax authority accepts for your year-end figures depends on your country; ask your accountant.