Improving The Stock Reconciliation Tool

1

There is a need to review the stock reconciliation/Stock take process in ERPNext.

In my opinion the current feature can only be used effectively by companies with few inventory items (maybe a few hundreds), once you have inventory in the thousands stock take using this tool becomes very difficult.

The following are the issues I see and my proposed solution

Procedure for keying in items when using the Stock reconciliation tool

In ERPNext you call up an item in the reconciliation tool and key in the total quantity physically counted, and you can only key in an item once in the item table

This can be problematic in a real life warehouse. It is possible to come across quantities of an item in various areas in the warehouse, it may not be convenient or even possible to put the items physically together and key in a single line of the item and quantity.

The ideal situation is for the system to allow users scan in the items as they are seen, it should be possible to key in many instances of an item, ERPNext should then be able to sum up the total quantities keyed in and compare with the system quantity to get the variance.

Number of Stock takers

At the moment only one person can do stock take in ERPNext, ideally multiple users should be able to open a ¨stock take sheet¨ in the system and when done the individual stock sheets should be summed up and the total used to compare with the system quantity.

What to do to Uncounted items

Uncounted items in this case are items that are not counted at all, the reason for this could be because we are not counting those set of item(s) during this stock take or because the items do not exist in the store anymore (zero quantity).

The system should give the user the option to either make quantity of uncounted items be zero or retain the system quantity of unseen items. This should be via a check box that comes up after summing up all stock take sheets and clicking save but before clicking submit

If this can be done the Stock reconciliation tool will become useable for companies with larger inventory counts

This is open to review by the community.

Olamide

Olamide

1 Like
2

Excellent suggestions! I’ve found that the download/upload feature helps a bit. I sum up like items in Excel to accommodate items in multiple locations. The issue with uncounted items bringing them to zero is one I’ve just started to tackle. I’m thinking a query of all items that did not have a stock reconciliation entry for the date(s) the physical inventory was taken for a given warehouse could then be used to create a new stock reconciliation to zero out the uncounted items. Can be done with SQL query and Excel, but would be better if it was a built-in report.

Mike

3

Maybe what is needed here is a separate app that can be installed to handle just the taking of inventory and then output the properly formatted csv file for the stock reconciliation tool to import and apply.

This way the app can handle all of the problems described above and just hand off the completed file when it’s done. Not perfect, but maybe easier to come by than a core section rewrite.

BKM

4

I would start with @bkm suggestion and develop up it for core integration. We should be able to do recon using an Android PDT. Every major ERP has app for stock taking especially on Zebra devices.

Have never used it so can’t comment.

5

Following along in the same line as @Muzzy , I already use a free Andriod app to do stock checks because it allows multiple entries of the same item, etc. It is not perfect because it requires some csv file manipulation before it can be imported to ERPNext. However, it does work and does a pretty good job.

You can find it here in the Google App Store:

Click Here → SDM Invnetory

You can read more about it and even watch the little video. It allows you to do it all on the Android phone or tablet and then email out the CSV file from the device. Oh yeah… and it lets you use the built in camera as a barcode reader!

It is just a suggestion, but it might also be a good starting point for developing a native ERPNext inventory app.

Hope this helps…

BTW… Thanks @olamide_shodunke for starting the thread. It is a great idea (even if we are a little late to the party). :grin:

BKM

6

Regarding bringing uncounted items to zero:

  1. Submit your stock reconciliation of items counted
  2. Download the Stock Reconciliation you submitted
  3. Create a new Stock Reconciliation, loading all items from the particular warehouse. This will include all items with any Stock Ledger entries for that particular warehouse
  4. Download the new stock reconciliation and open in Excel
  5. Do a MATCH() to find items NOT IN the original reconciliation
  6. Go through the new Stock Reconciliation, and bring those line qty down to zero
  7. Submit the second Stock Reconciliation

Mike

7

Hi ,

Just wondering if there’s been any improvement to the stock taking functionality?

Kind regards,