ERP & Operations

• Bigcrea Team
• ERP & Operations

Stock Control 101: Stop Selling What You Don't Have

Two stock failures hurt a small retailer: selling an item you don't have (one angry customer, one refund, one review) and quietly sitting on cash tied up in items that never move. Both trace to the same root - nobody knows, precisely, what is on the shelf.

One source of truth

The moment stock lives in two places - a spreadsheet and the website, the till and a notebook - it is wrong somewhere. Every sale, delivery and return should update a single system, and everything else should read from it. This is the entire philosophy of an ERP, scaled to small-business reality.

Let alerts do the remembering

Set reorder points per product - minimum level plus supplier lead time - and let the system nag you before shelves empty. The fast movers stop running out; the slow movers stop being accidentally re-ordered. Dead stock gets flagged for clearance instead of gathering dust and locking up cash.

Count little and often

Annual stocktake trauma is optional. Rolling counts - one shelf or category a week - keep accuracy high without shutting the shop. Barcode scanning on a phone makes it a ten-minute job. When website, till and stockroom finally agree with each other, click-and-collect and online selling stop being risky promises - which is exactly how our platform integrations are designed.