It is Saturday afternoon and the till is busy. A customer asks if you have a product in another colour. You walk to the back to check, because the honest answer is that you do not know until you look.
The register tells you what came in today. It does not tell you what is on the shelf or what has quietly run out. For many independent retailers, a register for the money and a notebook for the stock is just how the shop has always run.
Free: the Retail Inventory Without the Guesswork course. A short walkthrough from manual counts to real-time stock tracking. Start the course
What flying blind costs you
You reorder things that are still on the shelf and miss things that sold out three days ago. The drawer count does not match, and you cannot tell if it was a pricing mistake or a till error.
Why the register and the shelf are strangers
A register records that money changed hands. It was never connected to stock, so the real count lives in a notebook, someone’s memory or a count done every few weeks. Between counts, you guess.
The process: four steps from two worlds to one
1. Tie each sale to a stock record
Make sure every sale you ring up reduces the count of that exact product.
Example: “Sold one blue, stock goes from 6 to 5.”
Pro tip: Use one product list for the till and for ordering so they cannot drift apart.
2. Treat each day as a session you can check
Open with a starting cash float, log every payment against the session, and compare expected to actual when you close.
Example: “Float 100, expected 740, counted 735.”
Pro tip: A mismatch is now a specific number with a session to trace it through.
Free: the Retail Inventory Without the Guesswork course. A short walkthrough from manual counts to real-time stock tracking. Start the course
3. Look at sales by product, day and hour
Review what sold and when, from the till record rather than a separate spreadsheet.
Example: “Saturday afternoon is your peak for accessories.”
Pro tip: Check it weekly and decide what to feature or reorder.
4. Set reorder points on what sells
Pair the sales view with a minimum and maximum per product so the system tells you when to restock.
Example: “Reorder at 5, up to 20.”
Pro tip: Adjust the levels when the season changes.
Where this runs
The four steps work with a spreadsheet and a till that records products. In the business system we set up for clients (Odoo Community), the Point of Sale app shares inventory with the rest of the business: every sale updates the same product record purchasing sees, each POS session is its own record, and POS reporting shows sales by product, day and hour. One independent retailer we worked with had a cash register and manual stock counts with nothing connecting the two. The standard POS setup, tied to the same inventory, was enough. The process is the point. The tool just keeps it going when you are busy.
Your next step
Ask yourself whether you could answer what is left of your top five products right now. If not, start with step one. the free Retail Inventory course shows how it works in a live system.
Free: the Retail Inventory Without the Guesswork course. A short walkthrough from manual counts to real-time stock tracking. Start the course