Item Count Best Practices
Creating counts will help make managing your inventory much easier when the time comes for periodic physical checks.
We'd recommend coming up with a count schedule where you count smaller amounts of inventory throughout the year. This will help find discrepancies between the software and your physical stock more easily—and can help identify potential theft, missed charges, expired items, etc.
As our inventory management guru Nicole says, “It’s much easier to find the source of smaller differences each month than thousands of units once a year.”
Nicole also recommends that counts for more valuable/highest turnover items should be performed more frequently than lesser valued items
Count fast-moving items once a month
Count medium-moving items once a quarter
Count slow-moving items twice a year
Creating a New Count
To take a count, you'll first need to create one by navigating to the 'Counts' section of inventory (Admin > Inventory > Counts).
Once you're here, select the 'Add New' button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. This will populate a new count modal. From here, you can choose how you want to take a count:
Blank: take a count of whatever items you want
To take a blank count, put the 'Blank Count' toggle to 'On'
Location: take a count of all items in a location
Select a location from the dropdown
All items in that location will automatically populate
Regardless of the kind of count you want to take, you'll also be able to input:
User: the Shepherd user who's doing the count
Notes: any notes about the count (optional)
Once that information's been added, select 'Save.'
Taking a count
After the count's been saved, click it to open. This will open a new count screen with all the items from the selected location.
With the count open:
Add the items you want to take a count for (if it's a blank count)
Otherwise, all items in the location will populate
Input the correct counts (in the Count column) for each item
Note: these fields autosave; your count in Shepherd won't be updated until you 'Finalize', either individually or all at once
To finalize by individual item, you can either select the empty square to the left of the item name and select "Finalize Selected", or select the action button to the right of the individual item
To finalize all at once, select "Finalize All" in the top right corner
Note: Deleting previous Counts will alter your Quantities