Back to guides
Inventory & Operations
Running a Stock Count Without Closing the Till
The old way — close the store, count everything, reopen — doesn't scale past a single small location, and it costs you sales hours you don't get back. A rolling count, done in sections while the store stays open, gets you the same accuracy without the closure.
How a rolling count works
- Split your stock into sections — by category or storage location — and count one section per day rather than everything at once.
- Count against the system's expected quantity at the moment you start that section's count, not at the end of the day, so sales that happen mid-count don't throw off your numbers.
- Log variances immediately, with a reason where one is known — spoilage, breakage, an uncounted delivery — rather than a bare number that means nothing three weeks later.
Reading the variance report afterward
A small, consistent variance across every count cycle is usually a process issue — portioning, waste logging, or receiving accuracy — worth investigating once, not every time it recurs.
A large one-off variance concentrated in a single high-value category is worth investigating immediately, not folding into "shrinkage" as a line item and moving on.
Want the full feature set behind Core POS?
Explore Core POS