Before you start
What this manual covers, and the one thing that decides whether a stocktake goes well.
Which job?
This manual covers two things and nothing else: the portal, where an administrator sets the company up and reads the results, and the scanner, where operators count. If you are looking for anything else, this is not the document.
Start six weeks out
A stocktake fails on the data, not on the day. Almost everything that goes wrong on a counting night was decided weeks earlier, by somebody who had not yet looked at their own part list.
The portal is free to use for all of this. You can set up your company, load your parts and bin locations, run a test count on a handful of racks and throw it away, as many times as you like, before you pay for anything. Nothing in this paragraph costs money. You pay per counting event, when you run the real one.
We cannot fix your data at one minute to midnight. If a part list arrives on the evening of the count with duplicate barcodes, blank columns and codes that do not match what is on the shelf, no software and nobody at this end can make that count come out right.
Everything you need to find those problems is in front of you, free, weeks in advance. The portal refuses a file it cannot read and tells you which line is wrong. Use it early and the count is uneventful.
A working order
| When | What | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| Six weeks | Load parts and bin locations. Fix what the portal refuses. | This is where the surprises are. A barcode that does not scan is found at a desk, not at a rack. |
| Four weeks | Walk a few racks with a scanner. Count twenty parts into a throwaway stocktake. | It proves the barcodes on the shelf match the catalog. Reading a file cannot prove that. |
| Two weeks | Add the operators, decide who counts where, print the sign-in sheet. | Nobody should be learning a login on the night. |
| One week | Tidy the warehouse. Put stock where it belongs. | Counting is the easy part. Finding things is not. |
| The day | Export your stock on hand. Create the stocktake, load the file, activate. | The accounting figures must be from the moment you stop moving stock, not from last week. |
Two things to understand first
The scanner stores nothing
Every lookup and every count is a live call to the portal. There is no local database on the device and no queue. A count that does not reach the portal has not been recorded, and the operator is told so immediately, while they are still standing at the rack.
That is a deliberate choice. It means you can watch a count happen from the portal as it happens, and it means nobody discovers at the end of the night that a scanner has been holding two hundred counts it never sent. It also means the warehouse needs wifi everywhere people will be counting. Check that six weeks out as well.
A stocktake is one counting event at one site
It may stay open for a week and still be one stocktake. If you count at three warehouses, that is three stocktakes, and the portal rolls them up into one company-wide answer for you. You never run two at the same site at once.
Operators cannot start a stocktake. An administrator creates it and activates it on the portal. Until then the scanner will look up parts and bin locations quite happily, but it will not record a count.