Inventory isn’t just stock. It’s cash sitting on your shelves A distribution center I heard about last year was sitting on 11 weeks of a particular SKU because their cycle counts kept coming back clean. Clean on paper. In reality, a slotting change six months earlier had split the product across two locations, and nobody had reconciled it. Eleven weeks of carrying cost, tied up in units they thought they needed to reorder. They didn't. This is the part that doesn't show up in

Inventory on paper tells a story. Your inventory report said 144 units. The floor had 11. If that's never happened to you, you haven't been doing this long enough. The system number and the physical number are two different things, and pretending they're the same is how you end up promising a customer a shipment you can't build. The system records what was supposed to happen — what got received, what got picked, what got transferred. The floor records what actually happened.

One receiving error can impact inventory accuracy for weeks Your system says you have 144 units of a SKU. You walk the aisle and count 131. Somewhere between the last receiving dock scan and right now, 13 units went sideways — and the uncomfortable truth is it probably wasn't one thing. Receiving is where a lot of it starts. A pallet comes in short-shipped, the driver's in a hurry, the paperwork says the right number, and whoever's checking either trusts the BOL or rushes thr