Hopefully you have had a chance to get through all the Day 1 Activities, to review here is a list; don't be tempted to skip through the steps in the interest of saving time today as it will result in a lot of extra time being spent on the count day to reconcile the inventory. You will be pleased to know that Day 2 is much easier than Day 1, but equally important to a smooth count.

Backoffice Things to Do

1. Complete any pending write offs,  transfers or vendor returns in the system

2. Connect and push all data from offline POS machines to the cloud

3. Verify all pending invoices have been properly received

4. Review your negative quantities to make sure there are no mislabeled SKU’s or that items were improperly received

Front of the House Activities

5. Your team has organized the store and made sure that inventory has been organized in a way that is easy to count

6. Any damaged items are written off, returned to vendor or discounted to sell

What to do on Day 2

Backoffice Things to Do

1. Begin by organizing the store (and storage area) in sections - determine who will count which section; some things to consider is rotating the counting so that the same team member is not always counting the same product.

2. As a best practice you should initiate a blind count and instead of counting one product and then moving on, we recommend that you use the mInventory application to count an entire area in whatever product order the items come up in. mInventory can be used on Android and iPhones and allows the counter to scan the product as it comes up and then consolidates all the counts at the end.

3. If you are counting at a product level then make sure you run a 0 balance report (especially items with recent sales) and check for those products - something may be in the store and incorrectly show as 0 on hand.  This is yet another reason to do section counts.

4. Lastly and not really for the inventory count but as a best practice , run a report on all pending or backordered purchase orders, and consider if you still want the product or need to cancel the order. Avoid surprises of items showing up after you have already ordered substitute products and creating a problem for you.  To avoid this you may want to use the shipping and vendor compliance sections of the PO’s to set cancel dates on unfulfilled orders.

5.  For Extra Credit: Run Attribute Analysis Reports to see Margins, Stock Days and Turnover by Department, Category and Vendor - This can help you plan any promotions in the future to move non performing or overstocked items

Front of the House Activities

Have your team download and familiarize themselves with mInventory, especially the section on Inventory Counts.  Make sure that each team member has their own user name and password and can log into the app; if passwords need to be reset or user created you should do so now using nGauge or the CAS Portal

On Day 1, your team would have organized the product and checked for damages, during the course of doing that they might have run across items that did not have barcode labels, this would be a good time to print those and resticker the product; if you are using CAS to print the labels you can use roll or Avery labels on your laser printer (money saving tip) or you can use Label.It for more printing styles and options.

Tomorrow is day 3, we will go through the best counting practices.
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