Stock control, step by step
One stock, many counters. How to get it in, move it out, count it, and find out where it went.
Open the stock consoleHow the stock model works
Everything else on this page follows from four sentences. Read them once and the rest is obvious.
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Deliveries go into the central store
One place holds the overarching stock. That is where the lorry unloads.
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Transfers push stock out to the places that sell
A bar, a counter, a van, a stall. Each holds its own running count.
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Sales deplete whichever location sold them
A till is tied to one location. Ring up a pint there and that location's count drops. Nowhere else.
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Waste and stocktakes reconcile the difference
What you received, minus what you sold, minus what you binned, should equal what is on the shelf. When it does not, that gap is the number worth knowing.
Levels are allowed to go negative. That is deliberate. If a counter sold twelve more than it was ever given, the honest thing is to show −12 in red, not to refuse the sale or quietly round up to zero. Money already taken is money already taken — the discrepancy is information, not an error to suppress.
Find your bit
Sign in at /stock. The row of buttons along the bottom is the whole app: Stock, Move, Delivery, Count and More.
Try it before you read it. Open the console and press Explore the demo. That loads a fully stocked business — a central store, three outlets, seventeen products and four days of trade including waste and a stocktake. Move stock about, break things, run the reports. Nothing is saved and no database is touched.
Setting it up Owner / Manager
Once, sitting down, before anybody needs it. About ten minutes.
Your locations
More → Locations → Add a location. You already have a Main store, marked central — that is the one deliveries go into, and it cannot be closed. Add one for every place that will sell independently.
Make a location per thing that counts its own stock, not per room. Two tills serving off one shelf are one location. One barrel in a van parked elsewhere is its own location, even if it is a single line.
Your products
More → Products & prices → Add a product. Name and sell price get you trading. The other four fields are what turn this from a price list into stock control, and each one switches on a specific feature:
- Cost — what you pay per unit. Without it the margin report and the stock valuation at cost are both zero.
- Unit — pint, bottle, each, slice. A label only, but it is the label on every count sheet, so make it the word your staff actually say.
- Per case — how many singles in a case. Set it and booking in a delivery becomes one tap per case instead of counting bottles. This is the single biggest time-saver on delivery day.
- Reorder at — the level you want warning at. Anything at or below turns up in the low stock tile on the Stock screen and in the reorder report.
Removing a product archives it, it does not erase it. Past sales and stock history are kept, so last month's reports stay correct. It just stops appearing on tills and count sheets.
Booking in a delivery Supervisor and up
The moment stock enters the business. Get this right and everything downstream is arithmetic.
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Press Delivery, and check the Into box
Normally the main store. Booking a delivery straight into a bar is allowed, but then it never shows as having been transferred, which makes the variance report harder to read later.
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Put the invoice number in the ref field
Optional, and the thing you will wish you had done when a supplier queries a short delivery three weeks later.
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Enter what physically arrived
Tap the case button — the one showing the case size, like +72 — once per full case, or type the number of singles into the box. Mix the two freely: four cases and three loose bottles is four taps and a typed 3.
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Press Book in
The green bar tells you how many lines you are committing. Stock goes up immediately and the movement is logged against your name.
Book in what arrived, not what you ordered. If the invoice says ten cases and nine came off the lorry, enter nine. Entering ten creates a phantom case that will show up as shrinkage at the stocktake and send somebody hunting for theft that never happened.
Moving stock out Staff and up
The everyday one. Store to bar, or bar to bar when one runs dry and another is sitting on plenty.
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Press Move and set From and To
They cannot be the same place — the screen tells you so before you get as far as pressing anything.
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Enter the quantities
Every row shows how many the source currently holds, so you cannot promise a counter something the store has not got.
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Press Move, then physically carry it
Both locations update in a single transaction. Stock can never leave one place without arriving at the other, even if the connection drops halfway.
Par levels and Top up to par. Set a target level for a location and the Top up to par button fills in every quantity needed to bring it back up in one tap. On a multi-bar site this turns the pre-service restock from a clipboard walk into about fifteen seconds. Set par levels under Stock once you know roughly what a bar gets through in a session.
Waste and breakage Staff and up
More → Waste & breakage. Pick the location, enter how many, say what happened. The stock leaves the business and the reason is recorded against it.
This is the difference between a number and a mystery. A dropped crate somebody logged is a line on the waste report. The same crate unlogged is an unexplained gap at the stocktake that looks exactly like theft. Make it normal and blameless to log waste, or people will hide it and your variance figures stop meaning anything.
Stocktakes and variance Supervisor and up
Where you find out whether any of the above actually happened.
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Press Count and pick the location
Every row shows what the system expects to be there.
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Type what is genuinely on the shelf
The variance appears next to each line as you type — red for short, green for over.
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Save the count
Levels are set to your figures, and the variance is recorded against the date so you can look back at it.
Count first, look second. The expected figure is on screen while you type, which makes it very easy to "count" your way to the number the system wanted. A count that agrees with expectations because the counter saw expectations tells you nothing at all. Count on paper, then key it in, and a bar that is quietly short every single week becomes visible instead of invisible.
Reading the numbers Everyone
The Stock screen is every product against every location, with the true total on the right. Three tiles sit above it: how many products you carry, what the stock is worth, and how many lines are at or below their reorder point.
- The chips along the top narrow everything to one location.
- Export CSV drops the table into a spreadsheet. It happens in the browser, so it costs nothing and works with no signal.
- Stock history (More → Stock history) is the full ledger — every delivery, move, waste entry and count, with who did it and when. This is where you go when a number looks wrong and you need to know how it got that way.
A negative number is a finding, not a fault. It means that location sold more than it was ever given — so either a transfer never got logged, or a till is pointed at the wrong location. Check the stock history for that product first; it usually answers the question in one glance.
Making sales come off stock Staff and up
Stock only depletes if the till knows which location it is standing on. This is the join between selling and stock control, and it is the single most common thing to get wrong. Once per device, at the start of the day:
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Open the till and go to the Products tab
The front page of the site, not the console.
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Under Team Mode, enter the six-character team code
From More → Team settings in the console.
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Tap your name and key in your PIN
The list shows everyone on the team who has a PIN set.
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Choose which location this till is on
Every sale on this device now comes off that location's stock, and the product buttons come from the shared list rather than the device.
Check the strip along the top of the till before service. It names the location. A till pointed at the wrong bar drains the wrong shelf all night and leaves you with two sets of wrong numbers — one bar mysteriously short, another mysteriously flush — which is far more work to unpick after the fact than to check beforehand.
Losing signal does not stop stock tracking. Sales are queued on the device and pushed in batches when the connection returns, retried every thirty seconds. Stock catches up on its own. A sale that times out and retries is discarded rather than counted twice, so nobody needs to guess.
Where did it all go? Supervisor and up
More → Reports. Pick a date range and a location, press Run report. Five of these are about stock rather than takings:
Every table exports to CSV from the browser, so exporting is free and works offline.
Margin is indicative, not true costing. It uses each product's current cost price, not what you actually paid for the case that sold. If your supplier put prices up mid-range, the older sales are costed at the new price. Good enough to separate a strong line from a weak one; not a substitute for proper FIFO costing at year end.
Who can touch what
Give everyone the smallest role that lets them do their job. People only see the buttons they can use — a staff member's console genuinely has no Delivery or Count on it — and it is enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the interface.
| Can they… | Owner | Manager | Supervisor | Staff | Viewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View stock | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Move stock between locations | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Log waste and breakage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Sell on the till | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Open and cash up shifts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Book in deliveries | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | — |
| Run stocktakes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | — |
| See reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | Yes |
| Set par levels | Yes | Yes | Yes | — | — |
| Products, prices and cost | Yes | Yes | — | — | — |
| Add or close locations | Yes | Yes | — | — | — |
| Manage the team | Yes | Yes | — | — | — |
Two rules protect the order of things, both enforced server-side: nobody can hand out or edit a role at or above their own, and nobody can change their own role or remove themselves. A team can never be left without an owner. Removing somebody takes effect on their very next request, not whenever their session expires.
When the numbers look wrong
A location has gone negative
It sold more than it was given. Either a transfer was carried physically but never entered, or a till is pointed at the wrong location. Check More → Stock history for that product — if there is no transfer in, it is the first; if there is, check the strip on each till.
One bar is short every week
Run Movement vs sales for that location over a few weeks before concluding anything. Consistent, proportional shrinkage across every line usually means unlogged waste or over-pouring. A gap on one or two specific products usually means something else.
Stock did not drop after a busy night
Check the till still shows sales queued. With no signal, sales sit on the device until it reconnects — the stock catches up when they go up. Nothing is lost, and re-entering them would double-count.
The valuation looks far too low
Cost price is probably blank on most products. Valuation at cost multiplies quantity by cost, so a missing cost values that line at zero. Fill it in under More → Products & prices.
I cannot see Delivery or Count
Those need the supervisor role or above. The console hides what your role cannot use, so this is working as intended rather than broken. Check the table above.
A working rhythm
Stock control fails from neglect far more often than from bad software. This is roughly the minimum that keeps the numbers honest.
Every session
- Top up each location to par before opening.
- Check each till names the right location.
- Log waste as it happens, not later.
Every week
- Count one location properly.
- Run low stock and order from it.
- Glance at movement vs sales.
Every so often
- Count everywhere on the same day.
- Review not selling and cut dead lines.
- Check cost prices are still current.
Counting one location a week beats counting everything once a year. A small, frequent count finds the problem while somebody still remembers the night it happened. An annual count finds a large discrepancy nobody can explain and everybody resents.
Just want to take money?
None of the above is needed to sell things. The till at the front page works with no account, no sign-up and no database — add products, tap them, take payment. Stock control is the optional half you switch on when one counter becomes three. The FAQs cover the till side.