With one shop and one store room, inventory is a counting problem. With several branches, a central warehouse and a delivery fleet, it becomes a systems problem. Stock is in transit, being returned, reserved for orders and sitting in the wrong place. We build inventory modules for retail and distribution businesses, including the Narmar POS & ERP suite, and the same mistakes appear again and again. This article lists them with practical fixes.
Getting stock movements right
Mistake 1: treating transfers as two separate events
A common shortcut is to reduce stock at the sending branch and add it at the receiving branch as two unrelated entries. If the truck is delayed, or the goods never arrive, the numbers lie and nobody notices for weeks.
Model the in-transit state
A transfer should be one document with states: requested, dispatched, in transit, received, and, when needed, partially received or disputed. Stock leaves the sender when dispatched, appears as in transit for the company, and joins the receiver only when someone confirms receipt. Differences between sent and received quantities become explicit records that someone must resolve.
Mistake 2: one stock number for everything
"We have 40 units" is not enough. Useful systems separate quantities by meaning.
- On hand: physically in the branch.
- Reserved: promised to customer orders but not yet shipped.
- Available: on hand minus reserved, which is what a salesperson can actually promise.
- In transit: on the way between locations or from a supplier.
- Damaged or quarantined: present but not sellable.
Showing available stock per branch, with the option to see nearby branches, lets staff fulfil orders from the right place instead of cancelling them.
Getting the data and the counts right
Mistake 3: weak product master data
Units of measure
Products are bought by the carton, stored by the pallet and sold by the piece. Without defined unit conversions, quantities drift and prices are wrong. Store a base unit for each product and conversions to the others, and make the system do the arithmetic.
Codes and variants
Duplicate items with slightly different names, missing barcodes and inconsistent variant handling for sizes and colours make every report unreliable. Agree on naming rules, require barcodes at creation, and review duplicates before you migrate old data.
Mistake 4: counting rarely, then trusting the count blindly
A full stock-take once a year closes the shop and still leaves errors for the other eleven months. Cycle counting works better: count a small, rotating set of items every day or week, prioritising fast movers and high-value items. When differences appear, record a reason, such as damage, theft or a data-entry error, and look for patterns by branch, user or supplier.
Make counts blind where you can: staff enter what they see, and the system compares afterwards. This prevents counters from simply confirming the expected number.
Reordering, control and sales channels
Mistake 5: reorder rules that ignore reality
Fixed minimum quantities for every branch rarely work. A busy branch needs more safety stock than a quiet one, and seasonal items behave differently across the year. Define reorder points per branch and product, based on actual sales speed and supplier lead time, and review them regularly. Even simple rules beat guesses, and clean sales history opens the door to forecasting later on.
Mistake 6: loose permissions and no audit trail
When anyone can edit stock quantities without a trace, errors and shrinkage become impossible to investigate. Treat stock changes as movements, not edits: every change is a transaction with a type, a user, a time and a reason. Limit who can approve adjustments, and review large ones. For multi-company groups, such as the construction contractors served by our Earth Movers ERP, make sure each company and branch sees only its own data.
Mistake 7: disconnected sales channels
If the shop, the online store and the sales team each keep their own numbers, you will oversell. Connect them to a single stock record, or synchronise often enough that selling the last item on one channel removes it from the others. Where connections can drop, point-of-sale terminals should keep working offline and reconcile when they reconnect.
A short checklist to review your setup
- Are transfers tracked as documents with an in-transit state?
- Do we distinguish on hand, reserved and available stock?
- Do unit conversions and barcodes exist for every product?
- Do we count a rotating sample of items regularly and record reasons for differences?
- Are reorder points set per branch and reviewed?
- Is every stock change logged with a user and a reason?
If several of these answers are no, your inventory data is probably less reliable than it looks. The Narmar team can review your current process and suggest fixes, whether that means configuring an existing system or building the missing pieces. Explore our services or contact us to start.
