Inventory Accuracy Cash Flow: Is Your Stock the Problem?
A distributor I know was convinced they had a cash problem. Payables piling up, line of credit getting thin, the usual pressure. What they actually had was $340,000 in finished goods sitting in three different rack locations that their WMS thought was either sold or not yet received. Real product, real value, invisible to finance.
This happens more than people want to admit. The balance sheet says you're inventory-rich but cash-poor, and everyone jumps to the cash side of the equation — tighter payment terms, slower vendor pay, emergency financing. Nobody goes back to the warehouse and asks whether the number in the system is actually the number on the shelf.
Inventory inaccuracy is a quiet tax on your whole operation. You overorder because you don't trust what you have. You can't fulfill orders you should be able to fill. You write off product that a decent cycle count would have found three aisles over. Every one of those is cash leaving the building through a door nobody's watching.
The fix isn't complicated, but it does require actually counting — consistently, systematically, not just at year-end when the auditors show up. Teams that run tight cycle counts on their fast-moving slots even once a week tend to catch variance before it compounds. They know what they have. That knowledge is worth something real.
If your CFO is worried about liquidity and nobody has looked hard at inventory accuracy in the last 90 days, start there. You might be more liquid than you think.
CountIt was built for exactly this kind of work — fast counts, clean data, no spreadsheet archaeology. More at www.count-inventory.com. The team behind it is at www.yuneva.com.
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