Minimum stock is a number, not a feeling

At a contractor we worked with, there was no stock registration at all. Not badly kept, simply absent. People looked in the warehouse and ordered on instinct.

That works for a surprisingly long time, because experienced people are good at it. Until it stops working: someone is sick, things get busy, or a material you normally use twenty at a time suddenly goes out a hundred at a time. Then you are standing on a job site without what you need, and that one day costs you more than a year of stock management.

Why a stock module often fails to fix this

The standard solution is a stock module in your ERP or invoicing package. And technically it works. You can register everything in it.

The problem is what comes out of it: a list of what you have. Quantities per item, tidy and correct.

But nobody acts on a list of quantities. To know what you need to order, you have to make a judgment call on every line: is 14 of this item a lot or a little, how fast do we use it, how long does delivery take. That is thinking work, and thinking work in a warehouse on a busy morning does not happen.

So the module gets filled in by whoever set it up, and after that by nobody.

What we built instead

An app where you count, and which then tells you what to order.

Every material has a minimum stock level, the number you never want to drop below. If the count falls under it, that item lands on an order list automatically. Out rolls a PDF you forward to your supplier.

The difference with a stock module is not technical. It is that the answer has already been given. You do not have to interpret anything, you do not have to make a decision per line. There is a list and you send it.

Where the real work sits

Not in the app. In setting that minimum stock level.

That is a conversation per material, and it is the one moment where you genuinely need someone with experience. How much of this do we use in a normal week, in a busy week. How long does the supplier take to deliver. What does it cost us when we run out: half a day of standstill, or just someone driving past to pick it up on the way.

That last one is the number that decides. A material you can get anywhere needs a low minimum stock level, no matter how much of it you consume. A material with a six week lead time needs a high one, even if you rarely use it.

That conversation takes an afternoon and it is the whole project. The app that follows is a week of work.

What you gain that you never asked for

Every count is a measurement with a date on it.

After a few months you can see which material keeps dropping below its threshold, and it is rarely the one people expected. You see which items you actually keep too generously stocked, money sitting on a shelf. And you see when consumption starts rising structurally, which usually says something about the kind of work you are winning.

None of those three was the reason to build the app. They come along for free because there is now a series where before there was nothing.

What to watch out for

A count nobody performs is worse than no count, because then you act on a number that is wrong. So agree on when counting happens and make it small enough to be sustainable. Weekly, for the thirty materials that genuinely matter, works better than monthly for everything.

And put a date on every count in your report. Anyone who sees a stock figure without knowing when it is from will use it wrongly sooner or later.

The claim

A stock system that tells you what you have leaves the thinking with the user, and for that reason it does not get used. A system that tells you what to order takes that work over. It is the same project with a different end point.