Automatic Cycle Stocktakes

Micronet 2.8 allows you to setup automatic cycle stocktakes which help to break up the task of counting your stock into manageable stock counting sessions. You can divide up your stock for counting by product category, order class or stocktake class and Micronet will automatically select the items to be counted depending on the total number of items, frequency of stocktakes and number of times each product category, order class or stocktake class is to be counted. In this way, you can conduct stocktaking over as many sessions as required so that every item in the warehouse is counted at least once a year.

For example, you might decide to divide up your stock for counting based on product category, and to do monthly counts with each category counted once a year. Accordingly, you set the stocktake frequency on each product category as one time per year. When you go into Micronet's Stocktake program and create a new batch (which you would do monthly), you select a monthly cycle, base the counts on product category and then create the items in the stocktake batch. Micronet automatically divides the total number of item counts into 12 (counts per year) so that there are 12 equally sized batches. It then displays all the items to be counted this time. You print the stock count sheets, count the stock and enter the counts back into Micronet. Micronet then sets the next stocktake date for each item in the batch as 12 months ahead so that it is not included in another batch until then.

This is a simple example. You can setup automatic stocktakes in much more complex ways. For example, you might want some items to be counted every week (high turnover items or those with frequent variances), others to be counted monthly and yet others to be counted only once a year.

An example will help to illustrate how Micronet selects the items to be counted.

A warehouse has stock of the following items:

Because the maximum stocktake frequency is weekly, you need to do weekly stocktakes. The stocktake frequency may be set on the product category, order class or stocktake class.

When you create your first weekly stocktake batch, Micronet totals all the counts - in this case, all the numbers in the Counts column above which add up to 241. It then divides this by the frequency of stocktakes - in this case, weekly which equates to 52.

241 ÷ 52 = 4.63

Rounding up, this means that Micronet will select 5 items for counting each week.

The items will be selected for counting as follows:

From this table, you can see a pattern - the weekly items are counted weekly, the fortnightly items are counted every fortnight, the monthly items will be counted again in Week 6, and so on.

Technical Tip Because Micronet rounds up the number of items for counting, some items might get selected for counting more often than their set stocktake frequency, e.g. some items marked for monthly stocktake might get selected for counting three weeks after their last stocktake date rather than four weeks. This is preferable to items not being counted as often as required.

The following sections explain the planning you need to do before setting up your automatic cycle stocktakes and then how to generate your stocktake batches for counting.