The Negative Stock Triage Guide

What a negative means. A negative stock figure is the ledger confessing. It says: I recorded more going out than I ever recorded coming in. The units were real, customers bought them. What is broken is the paper trail, and the minus is your best clue to where. Never zero a negative to make a report look clean. You are deleting the confession and keeping the crime.

The three causes

1. The receipting break. Deliveries post to one code, sales ring on another. Twins, recycled barcodes, a new pack size on an old code. The negative grows a little with every delivery cycle. The tell: a healthy-selling line, deeply negative, with a sibling code hoarding stock that never sells.
2. The production line. Ingredients arrive on one code and leave as something else. Flour becomes bread, a carcass becomes mince and steak. The product codes go negative while the ingredient codes grow ghosts. The tell: fresh departments, and the negative roughly mirrors a fat claim nearby.
3. The uncaptured movement. Returns, transfers between branches, deposits and crate cycles, wastage never written off. The tell: irregular jumps rather than steady growth, and deposit or returnable lines deep in the minus.

The first three actions

1. Rank by value, not by count. Multiply each negative by its cost and work the rand list top down. Twenty lines usually carry most of the money.
2. Read each line’s story before touching it. What arrives on this code, what leaves on it, which sibling could be its twin? The pattern names the cause, and the cause names the fix: receiving correction, production rules or a reconciliation.
3. Count the family, fix the source, then correct the number. A physical count of the live code and its twins sets the true position. The source fix stops the bleed. Only then does the correction hold. A number corrected before the cause is fixed is broken again by the next delivery.

One exception is sacred: deposit and returnable lines. Those negatives are real money circulating in crates and bottles. Reconcile them, never zero them.

What next. If this guide found problems, the Store Health Audit quantifies them in rand and hands you the plan. If it found none, your store is rarer than you think.