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One stock figure, every location, live
When each store keeps its own count, the number on the screen and the number on the shelf drift apart within a week. The cost is not the spreadsheet — it is the customer who was promised an item that is sitting at the other branch, or not at all.
How it usually works today
- Each location keeps its own count, in its own file, updated when somebody gets to it.
- Finding out whether the other store has one means calling the other store.
- The online listing and the shop floor disagree, and the customer finds out first.
- Nobody can say what is actually on hand without walking the aisles.
What replaces it
- One figure per item, visible from every location at once, updated as it moves.
- A sale, a transfer or a delivery adjusts the count everywhere the moment it happens.
- Low-stock and reorder points that watch themselves instead of waiting to be noticed.
- A transfer between branches that is recorded rather than shouted across a phone line.
The problem is almost never the counting
Most owners we meet already count carefully. What breaks is that the count lives in one place and the decisions get made in another — at a second till, on a delivery van, in an online order that came in overnight. By the time the master file is updated the decision has already been made against a stale number. A system fixes this by making the count a single shared fact rather than a document somebody maintains.
Retail and wholesale in the same business
Several of the operations we have looked at run a shop and a wholesale trade off the same stock — a bakery with two facilities selling retail and shipping nationally, a judaica store with eight thousand square feet and a shipping operation behind it. Those are two different order flows drawing on one pool, and off-the-shelf retail software usually handles one of them well and the other badly. Built properly, they are one inventory with two front doors.
What it connects to
Stock is rarely worth building alone. It usually wants to reach order entry on one side and billing on the other, so that an order commits stock and an invoice records what actually shipped. That is the practical argument for one system rather than three tools with exports between them.
Tell us what your business runs on.
We start by drawing how the work actually moves through your business. That drawing is yours whether or not you build with us.
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