Free printable inventory count sheet
It has a column for the bin, a column for a recount, a column for initials — and no column telling the counter what the answer should be. QuickBooks has none of those, and its own worksheet prints the expected quantity beside the blank unless you know to turn it off.
The sheet
or Ctrl + P — ⌘ P on a Mac
The rest of this page won't print. Fill in the heading, take it to the rack, and use one sheet per bin or aisle rather than one long list — a sheet is easier to hand to a second person, and a missing one is obvious.
| Bin | Part number | Description | Count | Recount | Initials |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The one column that matters
Its Physical Inventory Worksheet gives you Product, Description, Category, Preferred vendor, Quantity on hand and a blank headed Physical Count. You can add SKU and remove the quantity — more on that below — but there is no bin column to add, because QuickBooks Online has no bin locations anywhere in the product.
The worksheet includes it by default, in the column immediately left of the blank. A counter who can see the answer writes the answer — not through dishonesty, but because it's a shelf of similar boxes at the end of a long day, the sheet says 25, you count 24 twice, and the sheet is probably right and you are probably tired. Customize → untick Quantity on hand. While you're there, tick SKU. Both take about thirty seconds and almost nobody does either.
Count what is there. The comparison happens afterwards, on a screen, by somebody who can see both numbers at once and decide which to believe. Keeping those two jobs apart is most of what a good count is.
QuickBooks has no bin locations at all, so there is no column to add. A part that lives in two places gets counted twice with no way to say where either figure came from — and its adjustment screen then refuses the same part twice outright: “Duplicate variant found.” The paper and the screen agree, all the way down.
Because the useful thing to know is not that a figure was wrong. It is whether the second person got the same answer as the first. A discrepancy that repeats is stock that has gone; one that doesn't is a counting mistake, and they are dealt with very differently.
Running it
Not one long list. A sheet is a unit of work you can hand to a second person, and a bin that nobody counted is obvious when its sheet is missing from the pile.
Sheet 4 of 11. A count fails far more often because a sheet went under a pallet than because somebody counted wrong, and you only find out when the totals are already in.
Not to apportion blame. When a figure looks wrong three days later, the useful question is what that person was looking at — and the only way to ask is to know who it was.
Count once, compare, then recount only what disagrees. Recounting the whole warehouse to catch four wrong numbers is how a one-day count becomes a three-day count.
Being honest about it
We make counting software, so take this for what it's worth — but the sheet above is a real one and it is free, with no email to hand over first. For a hundred parts on a Saturday morning it is genuinely the right tool, and a scanner would be an expensive way to avoid a job that takes an hour.
It stops being the right tool at about the point where somebody has to type the numbers back in. Two hundred lines is an afternoon of typing and a handful of transcription errors that nobody will ever find — on a screen with no undo on it. Two thousand across forty bins with six people counting is a week and a stack of paper, and the paper is not the slow part — the keyboard is.
That is the whole of it. The counting happens on scanners your people already know how to hold, the numbers arrive without being typed twice, and a part found in two bins adds up instead of arguing with itself.