In March, the warehouse manager of a 40-person building-supplies distributor slid a stock report across the table and said, “This claims we’re holding 1,200 units of a fitting we haven’t sold since 2022.” Two people walked out to check. The shelf held 90.
That gap between what the system said and what was physically there is where the money was hiding. Over the next five months, an ERPNext Consulting engagement rebuilt how this company counted, reordered, and priced its stock. The final write-off came to $380,000.
Why the numbers drifted 34% away from the shelves
Nobody was stealing. Three ordinary habits were doing the damage. Receiving clerks booked goods against the purchase order the moment the truck arrived, before anyone counted the pallets. And the annual stocktake happened on a Sunday, run by people who don’t normally touch the warehouse.
Individually each habit looks small. Together they made the stock figure useless for decisions, so managers stopped trusting it and ordered by gut. Gut ordering at this company meant carrying roughly nine weeks of slow-moving items instead of four.
The first 30 days: three unglamorous rules
We didn’t start with settings. We started with what people do at 7:30 a.m. when a truck backs in.
- Goods landed in a waiting-to-be-checked location, not sellable stock, until a blind count was entered the same day.
- Anything returned by a customer got tagged and moved to a quarantine shelf within the hour, so it could not be promised to the next buyer.
- The stocktake moved to a normal working Thursday, split into 14 zones, with each zone counted by someone who doesn’t pick from it.
Two of those rules needed a small change in how the system handled locations — the kind of tweak an ERPNext Consulting team makes in an afternoon. The third needed a rota. The rota was harder.
What the owner saw by month five
The number that ended the argument wasn’t the write-off. It was reorder spending, down 22% while order fill rate climbed from 84% to 96%. That combination is impossible if the stock figure is fiction.
- Weeks of stock by category, reviewed every Monday for 20 minutes instead of monthly.
- A dead-stock list anyone can sort by last sale date, with anything past 180 days flagged for a pricing decision.
- One number per item: what’s physically on the shelf, never a report number and a shelf count added together.
If your warehouse and your reports disagree, pick ten items tomorrow, walk out, and count them. The size of that gap tells you whether you have a stock problem or a trust problem — and the second one costs more.