About setting up cycle stocktaking

To minimise the planned closings of the business that are required for full stocktaking, you can use a combination of full stocktaking and cycle stocktaking.

For cycle stocktaking, all items are assigned to specific cycles and separate stocktakings are performed for each cycle’s items at the appropriate frequency. Because they can be conducted more quickly, cycle stocktakings are less disruptive to daily operations; they can also be tailored to specific business types. For more information, see: Overview of stocktaking options.

We recommend that you set up stocktaking by cycles during the initial configuration of the Inventory workspace. However, you can configure cycle stocktaking later as well.

General stages

The configuration of cycle stocktaking includes the following stages:

1. Creating stocktaking cycles.
2. Assigning stock items to appropriate cycles.
3. Creating stocktaking types.
4. Performing the stocktaking.

These stages are discussed in the following sections.

Creating stocktaking cycles

You create stocktaking cycles by using the Stocktaking cycles (IN208700) window. You should decide how often you want to perform full stocktakes and which items you want to stocktake more frequently (and how often). For the full stocktake and for each cycle, you specify how many times in a year the items should be counted, that is the stocktaking-per-year value.

We recommend that you select the stocktaking-per-year values (frequencies) for cycles as factors of the largest stocktaking-per-year value. Thus, items of all cycles will be counted during the full stocktaking, which is performed least frequently, and some of the other stocktakings will include items of more than one cycle.

Assigning stock items to appropriate cycles

If you configure cycle stocktaking during the implementation stage, you can assign stock items to stocktaking cycles when you import the stock items from your legacy system. Otherwise, you assign each item to an appropriate cycle manually.

Creating stocktaking types

You will need a type for a full stocktaking (see Create a stocktaking type for full count ) and one type for stocktaking by frequency. Optionally, you can create a stocktaking type for each cycle. You should plan the convention for the identifiers of stocktaking types and decide how to organise data on stocktaking sheets for each type of stocktaking.

Performing the stocktaking

Perform the stocktaking in the following order:

1. Conducting an initial full stocktaking by using the Full stocktaking type.
2. Conducting other stocktakings with the frequency determined by the largest (among all cycles) number of stocktakings per year and by using the stocktaking type that selects items by their stocktaking frequency. For each stocktaking, only items that are due for stocktaking by their cycle frequency will be included. Some stocktakings will include only the items with the largest frequency, while other stocktakings will be joint stocktakings for items from two or more cycles.