What Is Stock Taking and How Does It Benefit Apparel Businesses?


Also known as inventory checking, stock taking is the practice of periodically checking your inventory (including finished goods and raw materials) level to ensure it matches what you have in your records. It also involves inspecting your inventory to be sure they are in good shape.
Keeping a tab on your stock items has numerous benefits. For one thing, it gives you full control over your inventory. Secondly, it can lead to lesser cases of stock discrepancies, which can impact your business negatively. Additionally, stock taking can improve your inventory management processes, leading to better customer satisfaction.
Though somewhat time-consuming, stock-taking is vital for every apparel and fashion business. In this post, we will be diving a bit deeper into what stocktakes are about and why they are important.
Best of all, we will share tips to make taking stock less cumbersome and faster.
Let’s get into it!
What is Stock Taking?

Stock taking is the process of physically verifying and assessing the inventory levels you have on hand. It involves counting the quantity of each item in stock and then matching it with what you have in your records.
Sometimes referred to as stock counting, the overarching goal of stocktaking is to monitor existing stock, and identify any discrepancies that may exist. It provides a snapshot of the current state of your inventory, enabling you to evaluate your stock accuracy, identify potential issues, and make informed decisions regarding procurement, sales, and overall inventory management.
Importance of Stock Taking
Accurate stock management is crucial for several reasons. Here are some of them:
1. Reduces Stock Discrepancy
Stock taking helps identify any discrepancies between recorded inventory levels and the physical stock on hand. These discrepancies can result from theft, errors in recording, or other issues. It also helps you identify products that have been damaged, and so can’t be sold.
Uncovering these irregularities during stock counting can lead to better inventory control, lesser instances of stockouts, and better financial performance.
2. Optimizes Inventory Levels
Stock taking provides insights into the actual stock levels of each item. By comparing these levels with the desired stock levels, you can easily identify products that are performing well sales-wise and those that aren’t.
This knowledge allows you to adjust your procurement and inventory management strategies, avoiding excess inventory costs or potential stockouts.
3. Prevents Financial Inaccuracies
Accurate stock records are crucial for maintaining reliable financial statements. Stock taking ensures that the recorded inventory values match the physical stock, enabling businesses to report their assets accurately and avoid any potential discrepancies that may lead to financial inaccuracies.
4. Enhances Customer Satisfaction
Consistent stock taking helps businesses maintain optimal inventory levels, reducing the likelihood of stockouts and ensuring timely order fulfillment. This, in turn, enhances customer satisfaction by meeting their demands promptly and efficiently.
Is Stock The Same As Inventory?

If you’ve been following this post to this point, you will notice we’ve mentioned stock and inventory several times, almost using them interchangeably.
But is stock the same as inventory? Well, not exactly!
Stock is a term used to refer to the finished products you have available. This includes products on your shelf waiting to be bought, and those that have been paid for by customers but yet to be shipped out.
Inventory, on the other hand, refers to both finished goods and production materials sitting in your warehouse. You will need a reliable inventory system to accurately monitor your inventory level.
Streamline your processes with a tailor-made inventory management solution.
How Do You Perform a Stocktake?
The process for performing a stocktake is very simple and can be done in the following steps:
- Plan and Prepare: Every stocktake process starts with a detailed plan. This involves assigning roles and duties to team members and creating a schedule for the stocktake. It will also require making arrangements to avoid disruptions to your business operations during the stocktaking period.
- Start Counting: This is the most crucial part of the stock counting process. For best results, we’d recommend pausing sales and shipment momentarily to ensure accurate counting. What’s more, it’s always best to count from warehouse to paper than the other way around. In other words, first, count what you have in your warehouse and then check if it matches what you have in your records.
- Investigate Discrepancies: The whole essence of stocktaking is to discrepancies in inventory levels – which are always bound to happen – in your inventory levels. Once you spot them, you will want to investigate the root cause of it. Doing so helps forestall future occurrences.
- Reconcile Inventory Gaps: It’s never enough to investigate discrepancies – you must go the extra step to reconcile them, ensuring what you have physically in your warehouse matches what you have on records.
Methods for Stock Taking
There are a couple of techniques you can use to track your stock to ensure there are no discrepancies. Using the right method will make managing inventory an easy affair.
That being said, here are some battle-tested techniques you can try.
1. Annual Stock Taking
Annual stocktake is exactly what the name implies: checking and counting materials and products on hand once a year.
This method best suits you if you handle stock keeping yourself – or with the help of a few hired hands.
2. Periodic Stock Taking
This method involves conducting stock taking at regular intervals, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually. During these predetermined periods, the entire inventory is counted. Periodic stock taking provides a comprehensive overview of the inventory, but it may be time-consuming and disruptive to daily operations.
3. Continuous Stock Taking
In this method, inventory counting is carried out continuously throughout the year, typically by counting specific items or sections of the inventory on a rotating basis. Continuous stock taking minimizes disruption to operations and provides more regular updates on inventory accuracy.
4. Spot Checks
Checking through your entire inventory takes a lot of time – and might be unnecessary in some cases.
Case in point: when you suspect a theft. Instead of sweeping through your warehouse, it might be better to do a spot check to find gaps in your inventory level.
Stocktaking vs. Stock Checking: What’s the Difference?
Stock taking and checking are both inventory tracking techniques that give you first-hand insight into your stock levels. However, they are used for different purposes.
Stocktakes are comprehensive audits you do to check the quantity and quality of the entire products and materials in storage.
Stock checks, on the other hand, involves doing the same, but for a specific set of product. For example, you can decide to check for all pleated dresses you have in stock to ensure there is enough stock to meet your customers’ demands.
It might also require checking to ensure there is enough safety stock available in your inventory.
What Is the Right Stock Taking Frequency?
How often should you do stocktakes for your business? The truth is, it’s totally up to you to decide. Once a year, twice a year, once a month, etc. are all fine.
But as a rule of thumb, counting your stock more often will enable you to identify discrepancies faster and easier, leading to efficient inventory control.
Tips to Ensure a Smooth Stock Taking Process
Stocktaking doesn’t have to be a cumbersome, time-draining endeavor. Here are tips to ensure it goes smoothly and efficiently.
- Use Barcode Scanners: This will make the process faster and easier, compared to physically recording the items in your warehouse.
- Perform the Stocktake During Off-Peak Periods: You wouldn’t want to count stock in your warehouse while at the same time shipping out orders – it can only lead to mistakes. As such, it’s advisable to perform stocktakes during off-peak periods like weekends or holidays.
- Don’t Rush It: As tempting as it might be to rush through the stocktake process, don’t do it, or else you risk repeating the process all over again. Worse, you could end up with inaccurate values in your system.
- Do It Regularly: Performing stocktakes once in a long while won’t cut it – you need to do it as frequently as possible to ensure your business stays healthy.
Move Your Business Forward With Uphance
We cannot overemphasize the importance of using the right inventory system to manage your stocktake processes.
You need a system that is capable of automatically tracking your stock as they move along your sales channels, and updating your inventory levels in real time. You need a system with a robust barcode scanner feature, as this will save you the trouble of manually counting your stock.
You need Uphance.
Uphance is an apparel ERP software uniquely designed for apparel businesses of all sizes and comes with a powerful stock-taking module.
Why not take Uphance for a spin to see things for yourself by starting a free trial?
FAQ
We’d say, do it as frequently as time permits. Regular stocktakes helps guard against inventory theft, identify slow moving and obsolete stocks. With this insight, you can forecast inventory purchase more efficiently.
Although they are sometimes used interchangeably, stocktake isn’t exactly the same as stock counting. While the former involves sweeping through a warehouse to spot gaps in inventory records, the later involves counting a portion of stock in a warehouse.
For best result and faster stocktaking, everyone – not just your warehouse staff – should be involved in the stocktaking process.