Tracking stock across a shop, a yard and a fleet of vans
How to keep one accurate count when stock lives in several places, including the vans your team drive around every day.
By The Osmuch team · · 5 min read
In short
- Treat each van as a stock location, not as stock that has already been used.
- Moving stock between places is a transfer, not a sale: the total does not change.
- Book parts used on a job against the job, from wherever they were taken.
- A short weekly van check catches most of the drift before it grows.
- The business-wide total is what reordering should look at.
In most trade businesses the stock is not in one place. Some is in the shop or on the trade counter, some in the yard or the stores, and a surprising amount is rolling around in the vans. The van is where stock figures go wrong most often, because it is where stock is used in a hurry, away from the office.
Make every van a location
The common mistake is to treat stock loaded onto a van as already used. It is not. It is still yours, still unsold, and it may come back to the yard at the end of the week. If a van is its own location with its own count, you can see what each engineer is carrying and nothing disappears from the figures just because it left the building.
Transfers, not sales
Moving stock from the yard to a van changes where it is, not how much you own. Record it as a transfer between locations. The yard goes down, the van goes up, and the business-wide total stays exactly the same. If moves are recorded as sales or adjustments instead, the total jumps about and nobody can tell what really happened.
Booking parts used on jobs
When an engineer fits a part, it should come off stock against the job it was used on. That does two jobs at once: the count stays right, and the job shows what it really used, which is what you need to price the next one. The easier this is to do on a phone, on site, the more often it gets done.
A weekly van check
Once a week, count what is on each van and compare it with the system. It takes ten minutes per van and catches most problems while they are small. It is also the natural moment to top the van back up from the yard, as a transfer.
Reorder on the total
Decide when to reorder from the business-wide total, not the figure in one place. Ten valves in the yard and six across the vans is sixteen valves, whatever the yard shelf looks like. Moving stock around the business is cheaper than buying more of it.
Questions
Should a van be a separate stock location?
Yes. Treating each van as its own location means you can see what every engineer is carrying, and stock does not vanish from the figures when it leaves the yard.
Does moving stock to a van count as using it?
No. It is a transfer between locations. The yard goes down, the van goes up and your total stays the same. It only comes off stock when it is used on a job or sold.
Doing this in Osmuch
In Osmuch you can set up each warehouse, store, stockroom or van as a location and transfer stock between them; a transfer changes where stock sits without changing the business-wide total, and each move is logged. Parts used on a project come off stock as they are added to it. The phone app keeps the day's work on the device, so a stock change made in a basement with no signal goes through when the phone is back online.
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