Inventory Tracking

Most of the buying is done. Ocean lead times mean the containers that will carry your November sales are either booked or about to be, and no checklist changes that now.

Every stockout conversation starts with the same calculation: units we would have sold times price. It produces a large, alarming figure that is wrong by roughly a factor of five, and because everyone knows it is inflated, the number gets discounted to zero and the real cost never gets measured.

Moving 1,800 units from your 3PL to a marketplace fulfillment center produces no sale, no revenue, and no gross profit. It also moves roughly 22,000 dollars of asset value from one line of your inventory report to another, consumes FIFO layers in a specific order, incurs freight that either becom...

Shrinkage is the difference between the units your system says you own and the units a count says you own. In a single-warehouse business that is one subtraction. In a multichannel business with a 3PL, an owned warehouse, and two marketplace fulfillment networks, it is four separate subtractions ...

It becomes one the moment goods change hands. Between those two events sits everything that goes wrong with inventory buying.

A three-way match compares three documents before a supplier invoice is approved for payment: the purchase order, the receiving record, and the invoice itself. The comparison is made on item, quantity, and unit price. If all three agree within tolerance, the invoice is approved. If any pair disag...

The reorder point formula is not wrong. The demand rate people feed it is.

A bundle breaks your books in two directions at once, and most sellers fix neither.

A mixed container does not have one landed cost rate. It has several, because the costs inside it are driven by different things. Ocean freight is driven by space, so it allocates by volume. Customs duty is assessed at a rate specific to each product's classification, so it does not get allocated...

A bill of materials, usually shortened to BOM, is the structured list of components and quantities required to produce one unit of a finished item. An assembly item is the finished item itself: a stock record that has a BOM attached and that comes into existence by consuming the components on tha...

An inventory aging report groups your units by how long they have been sitting, valued at cost, usually in bands of 0 to 90 days, 91 to 180, 181 to 365, and over a year. It is the earliest reliable signal that a write-down is coming, because inventory that has aged past its sell-through curve alm...

Obsolete inventory is stock that can no longer be sold at or above its carrying cost in the ordinary course of business. A write-down reduces the recorded value of that stock to what it is actually worth. A write-off removes it from the books entirely, usually because it has been disposed of or h...

A third-party logistics invoice contains three different kinds of cost, and they belong in three different places. Receiving and inbound handling attach to unit cost. Storage is a period expense in most cases and a capitalized cost in some. Pick, pack, and outbound shipping are cost to serve, whi...

A cycle count checks a small slice of inventory on a rolling schedule instead of counting everything at once. Done properly, it touches 20 to 60 SKU-location combinations a day, takes under an hour, requires no shutdown, and produces better accuracy than an annual wall-to-wall count because error...

One SKU has four different costs because "cost" answers four different questions, and a multichannel seller needs all four. There is the inventory cost that sits on the balance sheet, the cost-to-serve that differs by channel, the marginal cost of the next unit, and the fully allocated cost that ...

Inventory in transit is stock you own that is not currently in any of your locations. It covers two distinct situations that behave differently: goods moving from a supplier to you, and goods moving between your own locations. Both belong on your balance sheet while they move. Neither is availabl...

Demand forecasting is the estimation of how many units of a product will sell in a future period. In an inventory business it exists to answer one operational question: how much do I need to have, and when do I need to have committed the cash to get it. A forecast that does not connect to a purch...

AI improves inventory planning in a narrow and specific way: it produces better demand estimates at aggregate levels, and better estimates faster than a planner working in a spreadsheet. It does not improve the two things that actually cause stockouts and overbuys in a multichannel business, whic...

Imported inventory enters QuickBooks Desktop in three steps that must happen in order: a purchase order when you commit to the buy, an item receipt when the goods physically arrive, and a bill when the supplier's invoice shows up. The purchase order posts nothing. The item receipt increases inven...

Advanced Inventory is an add-on module inside QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise that extends the base inventory engine with multi-site tracking, bin and lot location detail, serial and lot number tracking, FIFO costing, barcode scanning, cycle counts, landed cost allocation, and sales order fulfillme...

A multichannel seller has exactly two workable ways to get inventory and cost of goods sold into Xero. Either you run a periodic method, where you value stock at period end and let the movement in the inventory account become your cost of goods sold, or you run a perpetual method, where an invent...

Inventory reconciliation at close is the test that decides whether your COGS, your margins, and your tax return are built on a real number or a guess. Here is the checklist to pass it.

Inventory turnover ratio tells you how many times you sold through and replaced your stock in a period. It is the single fastest read on whether your cash is working or sitting on a shelf.

Sell-through rate answers one question: of the units you brought in, how many actually sold in the window? It is the fastest read on whether a buy was a hit or a mistake.

Two sellers with identical sales and identical purchases can report different profits, and pay different taxes, purely because they value inventory differently. The method is not a formality.

Reordering is a timing problem dressed up as a math problem. Get the timing wrong and you either stock out and lose sales or overbuy and trap cash. Here is a method that does not live in a brittle spreadsheet.

When the same SKU lives in four places, you do not need four spreadsheets. You need one count that knows where every unit sits and what it cost. Here is how to set that up.

Safety stock is the cushion that keeps a bad week from becoming a stockout. The reorder point is the on-hand level that tells you to buy. Together they decide whether you ever run dry.

An ecommerce seller with one warehouse has an inventory problem. An ecommerce seller with five (FBA, 3PL, home, in-transit by sea, in-transit by air) has an accounting problem dressed up as an inventory problem. ConnectStock solves the accounting side, where most other inventory tools stop at counts.

GMROI is the dollars of gross profit you generate for every dollar invested in inventory. It is the single most useful inventory metric for ecommerce sellers, and the one most commonly missed because retail accounting software doesn't compute it natively.

Most ecommerce sellers know their company is profitable. Few can answer which SKUs are dragging that profit down. The difference is what separates a business that scales from one that grows revenue while shrinking margin.

Track your Amazon FBA inventory with 100% accuracy using ConnectBooks’ advanced Daily Ledger sync.

At ConnectBooks, we understand that managing real inventory costs goes beyond purchase prices. We're excited to introduce the new Landed Cost feature. A powerful addition to our inventory management system that helps you track and allocate all costs associated with bringing products to your warehouse.

Best Examples of Just-In-Time (JIT) processes and results that will blow you away. Explore real-world Examples of Just In Time inventory systems across industries. Learn how JIT principles boost efficiency and cut costs in modern business.

Looking to understand the concept and benefits of a perpetual inventory system? Join us as we're Demystifying Perpetual Inventory Systems: exploring the ins and outs of this powerful system, including advantages, disadvantages, and if it's the right fit for your business.

Seeking information on how to effectively manage inventory across multiple sales channels? Discover how to optimize your multi-channel inventory management, boost sales, and improve customer satisfaction with our expert strategies and insights.

For some eCommerce businesses, inventory is something that is best left to someone else. This is why dropshipping or 3PL is such a common practice. However, if you want to have control over your own inventory, you’ll need to find a way to accurately account for every item under your purview.

When you run an eCommerce business, you have to know exactly how much every item costs. Unfortunately, this isn’t always easy, especially when the cost of getting products to their destinations varies with each and every product.