Cycle Counts: Inventory Accuracy as a Cadence

The annual stocktake is the wrong shape for an ITAD warehouse. Stock moves daily — every receiving brings new assets, every outbound takes some away, every testing failure can quietly shift status without moving a label. Once a year is too late to catch the drift. Cycle counts answer that problem with small, frequent, scoped counts that keep the database in sync with the rack.

The four-step lifecycle

Plan: define the scope (a zone, a rack, a category) and the schedule. Cycle-count plans live in /settings/core/cycle-counts and can repeat weekly, monthly, or on-demand.

Assign: pick the operator. The count appears on their queue with the scope and a target completion date.

Count: the operator walks the scope with the scanner. Each scanned asset matches against expected. Missing assets are flagged. Found-but-not-expected assets are flagged. The platform doesn’t pretend the count is complete until every expected position is reconciled.

Reconcile: variances are reviewed, reasons are recorded, and the inventory state is updated. A missing asset gets a status flip (lost, in-transit-not-recorded, or moved-without-update) and a reason. The audit row preserves the original count and the reconciliation, both.

Why cadence matters

One reconciled count per quarter, per zone, with a 99% accuracy target — easier to maintain than a 100% accuracy target once a year. The platform shows the trailing accuracy rate per zone, which is the metric that actually predicts whether your next outbound order will surprise you at the dock.