You don’t know exactly how much stock you have in your warehouse. You know approximately. And that “approximately” costs your business money every month — on unnecessary purchases, lost sales, and inventory that vanished without a trace.

If you recognise yourself in at least three of the five signs below, it’s time to change your approach to inventory management. Inventory management is a system for tracking the movement of goods and materials: receiving, transfers, write-offs, and shipments. Without it, your business operates blind.

Why do Excel and notebooks fail at warehouse management?

Excel works for tracking 20-30 items when one person is responsible. As soon as you add a second warehouse worker, two shifts, or 100+ SKUs, problems begin. Someone forgot to enter data, someone overwrote a formula, someone is working with yesterday’s version of the file.

Studies show that manual inventory tracking leads to 8-15% discrepancies between actual stock and records. For a business turning over 500,000 UAH/month, that’s 40,000-75,000 UAH in “invisible” losses.

Key problems with Excel-based warehouse accounting:

• No change history — who changed what and when is unknown
• Impossible for two people to work simultaneously
• No automatic stock recalculation after each operation
• No link to documents (delivery notes, acts)

Read more about comparing approaches in Excel vs ERP: When Spreadsheets Stop Working.

Sign 1 — You don’t know your real stock levels right now?

If answering “how much of product X do we have in stock?” requires physically going to count — that’s the first and most obvious sign of a problem. In proper inventory management, the answer takes 5 seconds: open the system, see the number.

When stock levels are unknown in real time, businesses face two consequences:

• Unnecessary purchases — buying what you already have because you can’t see current stock
• Lost sales — promising a customer a product that’s actually out of stock

In ERPJS, stock levels update automatically after every operation — receiving, dispatch, transfer. No manual counting needed.

Sign 2 — Does stocktaking bring surprises?

A difference of more than 5% between “on paper” and “in reality” after stocktaking is a serious red flag. It means errors have been accumulating for months without anyone noticing. Often it’s theft, mix-ups, or simply unrecorded write-offs.

Regular stocktaking isn’t just “count everything once a year.” It’s a control tool that should run monthly or even weekly for critical items.

In ERPJS, stocktaking is a separate document: you enter actual quantities, the system compares them with recorded figures and generates a discrepancy report. The entire process takes an hour instead of a full day.

Sign 3 — Has product mix-up become routine?

Shipping the wrong product to a customer because items got confused in the warehouse isn’t just a mistake — it’s lost trust and direct financial losses: returns, re-shipping, compensation. If this happens more than once per 100 shipments, the problem is systemic.

The root cause is lack of clear product identification. When a warehouse worker relies on memory instead of scanning a barcode or checking an SKU in the system, mistakes are inevitable.

An accounting system solves this at the process level: every shipment is linked to specific items with SKUs, serial numbers, and specifications.

Sign 4 — You don’t know the true cost of your products?

Cost isn’t just the purchase price. It’s procurement + shipping + customs + storage + handling. If you calculate profit as “sold for 1000, bought for 600, earned 400,” you’re likely missing 30-40% of real expenses. This means your management accounting is showing an illusion of profit.

Automatic cost calculation in ERPJS accounts for all components: from purchase price to logistics costs. You see the real margin on each product and can make decisions based on facts, not intuition.

Sign 5 — Write-offs and returns go unrecorded?

Stock disappearing from the warehouse without a document is a black hole in your accounting. Broken, expired, returned by a customer, used internally — if it’s not recorded, discrepancies at stocktaking are guaranteed. And you won’t be able to explain to auditors where the goods went.

Every warehouse operation must be documented: write-off act, return act, transfer act. In an inventory management system, this takes a minute — select the operation type, specify items, confirm.

What to do if 3+ signs match?

If you recognised yourself in three or more points, it’s time to move from manual tracking to a system. Here’s a concrete 2-week plan:

1. Week 1: Stocktaking. Count everything in your warehouse. Record actual quantities. This is your “point zero.”
2. Week 1: Enter stock levels. Upload quantities into the accounting system. In ERPJS, you can import from an Excel file.
3. Week 2: New rules. Every warehouse operation goes through the system. Receiving, shipping, write-offs, returns — everything is recorded.
4. Week 2: Verification. At the end of the week, compare system quantities with reality. Discrepancy should be minimal.

ERPJS lets you start for free: inventory management, stocktaking, product tracking — all available on the free plan.

Get your warehouse in order
ERPJS is a management accounting system with a complete inventory module: real-time stock levels, stocktaking, cost tracking, goods movement. Free plan with no time limits.

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