Stock control that no longer lives in one person's head
A Melbourne retailer with several shops came to us running stock on spreadsheets and memory. We built one screen that shows what is on the shelf, what is in the back room, and what needs to be reordered, across every shop at once.
The problem
The count lived on a spreadsheet and a manager's memory
This retailer runs a handful of shops around Melbourne. Each one kept its own stock spreadsheet, updated when someone had a quiet moment, and the rest of what was known about stock lived in the head of the most senior person on the floor. If they were away, the shop was guessing.
The cost showed up in two directions at once. Fast movers ran out midweek because nobody had noticed the shelf was thin, and slow movers got reordered out of habit and sat in the back room until they were marked down. The daily stocktake that used to eat an hour each morning was really a reconstruction: walk the floor, read the shelves, then type it into a sheet that the other shops could not see.
What they wanted was not a bigger spreadsheet. They wanted to know, at any moment, what was on the shelf, what was in the back room, and what should be reordered, without having to trust one person's memory or stitch three files together.
What we built
One view of shelf, back room and reorder
We built a single stock screen. For every item, in every shop, it shows three numbers: on the shelf, in the back room, and a reorder flag when the shelf plus back room drops below what a normal week sells. The office sees all shops at once; each shop sees its own.
A tablet at the counter lets staff scan or tap an item and adjust the count, and the change lands everywhere at once. Sales from the existing point of sale take stock off the count on their own, so the floor is not double-entering every sale. The reorder list is generated from the counts rather than remembered, and head office can see stock sitting idle at one shop and move it before placing a new order.
It is plain software, not a dashboard full of charts. The point was to remove the manual steps and the single point of memory, not to add a reporting layer nobody opens. It runs as a web app on the counter tablet and on the manager's phone, so the count is in reach wherever the day happens to be, and there is nothing to install on the shop till. The work sits in the same lane as our other custom software and mobile app builds.
What changed
The morning count became a glance
The daily stocktake that used to eat an hour each morning is now a glance at the counter tablet. Staff no longer walk the floor building a sheet from scratch; they confirm what the screen already shows and fix the few items that look wrong. A new casual can do the opening count because the steps are on screen, not in a manager's head.
Reorders stopped being a memory exercise. The list is there when it is needed, built from the actual counts, so the fast movers get topped up before they run out and the slow movers stop being reordered on habit. Head office can move stock between shops instead of buying more of it.
The change that mattered most was borrowed time. The senior person who used to hold the whole picture can now spend the morning on the floor with customers instead of rebuilding a spreadsheet, and the shop keeps running when they are not there. If your stock control looks like this, tell us about the project and we will talk through whether the shape fits.
Questions
Questions buyers ask
What does the store staff actually do differently day to day?
Less guessing. The morning count that used to mean a clipboard and a half hour of walking the floor is now a glance at the tablet on the counter. When something is low, the screen shows it before a customer asks. A casual who started last week can do the count because the steps are on screen, not in a manager's head. You can see the wider shape of this work on custom software solutions.
Do you connect it to our point of sale system?
Usually, yes. The stock view only stays honest if sales take stock off the count on their own. We wired the app into the existing POS so a sale at the counter drops the number without anyone typing it twice. Where the POS would not talk cleanly, we used the export it already produces. The point is to remove a manual step, not to replace the till. If your setup is unusual, tell us what you run and we will say up front whether the connection is straightforward.
Can this run across more than one shop?
That was the whole reason this one got built. The retailer had several shops, each keeping its own spreadsheet, and no one could see the group at once. The app treats each shop as its own count but rolls them up to one office view, so head office can see what is sitting in the back room at a different location and move it before reordering. Multi-site stock is the normal case for us, not an add-on. More examples sit on the case studies hub.
How do you scope a stock control build like this?
We start by watching the real routine, not by writing a spec from guesses. A short discovery turns the messy morning count and the mental reorder list into a written shape of what to build, described on How we work. Then we ship the smallest useful version and let the staff poke at it. We keep the person who writes the code in the same conversation as the person who wrote the spec, so the thing that lands is the thing the floor actually needed.