5 Physical Inventory Counting
All merchandise items, whether entering the store through receiving and return functions or leaving the store through sales and shipping functions, are tracked using an inventory process. This inventory tracking occurs at the item level, resulting in an audit trail from the time the item enters the store and continuing until the item leaves the store.
The inventory process allows you to enter item inventory counts and adjust the inventory quantity of items. The Xstore Physical Inventory function allows you to accurately and efficiently count on-hand merchandise. After a count takes place, the local inventory is updated, and accurate counts are posted to the home office. Physical Inventory can be conducted through the register system.
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Real-time inventory is adjusted automatically during normal POS activity. This normal activity includes-but is not limited to-sales, returns, shipping, and receiving of physical, saleable store merchandise. Real-time inventory does not require any additional interaction by the user during normal transaction processing.
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Location based inventory tracks all merchandise items that leave or enter the store by associating all items with a specific inventory location. This type of merchandise tracking creates an audit trail record that tracks an item from the time it enters the store until the time it leaves. See the Location Based Inventory chapter for more information.
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The physical inventory method uses counting as the means by which store personnel manually count merchandise items in the retail store. A store associate performs the count, and then enters the count values into the system where they are stored. The system applies the adjustments to each item's inventory.
Xstore provides three different types of inventory counts to meet your specific requirements:
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Physical Count: Counting all in-stock items.
To perform a physical count, a layout must be set up for the store using the Store Layout functionality. Multiple count sheets are created to allow several associates to count different sections of the store. Additional cycles of counting can be performed if there are variances from the expected values and from previous counts. See Physical Count Process for more information.
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Cycle Count: Counting a subset of the entire stock.
Only one count sheet is used for a Cycle Count, although additional cycles of counting can be performed if there are variances from the expected values and from previous counts. See Cycle Count Process for more information.
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Supply Count: Counting internally used supplies, rather than saleable items.
This count type is like a Cycle Count; however, it automatically populates the count sheet with all supply items defined for your store. See Supply Count Process for more information.
The following processes described in this section are used to create and find the count documents, create count sheets, and count the on-hand merchandise.