If your inventory in real-life is different to what's displayed in Shopfront, here's a few helpful steps to assist you with finding where it went wrong.

Note: To make best use of this article, the inventory in Shopfront will need to have been correct in Shopfront at some point.

Find When it Went Wrong

The first step to determining what the issue is, is to find where the issue first started to occur. The easiest way to do this is to go to the inventory log for the product which has a discrepancy.

Open the Menu
Expand Stock Management
Select Products
Search for your product
Press the View button next to the product
Select Inventory Log

You then might need to filter the log to display the correct Outlet (if you have multiple Outlets) and potentially specify the date range from the last known time the inventory was correct (e.g. after a stocktake) to the current date (if you don't know the precise date, you can just scroll through the log instead).

We would then suggest going back to the last event where you believe the stock was correct and then going through each event to see how the stock has managed to become incorrect.

After you've found where the issue is, you can resolve the issue (this could be doing something like entering an invoice that was missed, manually editing the product to fix the inventory or performing a stocktake).

Common Reasons Inventory is Incorrect

There's a large number of reasons why inventory might be incorrect, but here are some common ones:

Missed or incorrect invoices
- Occasionally invoices aren't entered correctly (or at all), ensuring invoices are entered before the stock is put out into the store is a good way to prevent missed invoices
Modified case quantities
- Sometimes products change how many come in a case, this can lead to confusion with existing stock on hand, when changing the number of items in a case it's a good idea to quickly check how many physical items you have on hand
Duplicate products
- If you have duplicate products in your store, it's possible one is having stock received into and the other is being used to sell with, we would suggest merging these products
Basket products
- Products which contain other products will reduce stock from the basket and the products contained within, we typically recommended to not track stock on the baskets (so only the products contained within the basket are tracking inventory)
Broken stock
- If stock is broken, you'll need to adjust the stock in Shopfront to match, we suggest transferring stock to a transferee
Stolen stock
- Unfortunately stock does sometimes get stolen and this will need to be adjusted in Shopfront, we suggest transferring stock to a transferee to record it

Catching Incorrect Inventory Early

The easiest way to find discrepancies is to reduce the amount of time that a discrepancy can occur for, we suggest running rolling partial stocktakes across your store as part of a weekly or fortnightly procedure.

To perform a rolling stocktake, create a procedure for your staff to perform on a consistent basis (e.g. weekly) and choose a starting category (e.g. white wine), then create a partial stocktake and scan that category's products.

Then for each period (e.g. weekly) choose a different category and perform a partial stocktake on that category.

When you have a discrepancy in the stocktake you then only need to compare the period since the last stocktake, significantly reducing the amount of time you have to go through to find issues.