Stock Count: Inventory Counting & Adjustment

A count sheet, with a state

Inventory › Counts › Stock Counts. Scope it once — a warehouse, some locations, some products — and it becomes a document: a name, a date, a state, a progress bar and a chatter. You can say "count 42 is in progress", report on it, hand it to an auditor, and reopen it.

Leave the locations and products empty to count every internal location of the warehouse. The scope is read once, when counting opens.

The expected quantity is frozen when counting opens

Pressing Open counting snapshots what is on every shelf in scope, and that number never moves again.

This is the difference between a count and an argument. If the expected quantity kept tracking the live stock, then a receipt booked while people were walking the aisles would quietly change what they are being measured against, and the variance report at the end would describe something nobody did.

It also means the module knows when the shelf changed underneath the count. At posting, any line whose quant no longer matches its snapshot is refused rather than posted: writing the counted number over it would silently undo the receipt or delivery that happened in between. Those lines go back for a recount, which is the only honest answer.

Blind counting, enforced on the server

On a blind count, counters do not see the expected quantity or the difference. Not hidden in the form — restricted on the field, which the ORM enforces on every read, so a hand-written RPC or an export cannot fetch them either.

A count where the sheet already says 12 is not a count. It is somebody agreeing with the computer.

Split it between people

Add the counters to the sheet, then Assign aisles hands out lines by location in bulk. Each counter sees their own count and can be given their own aisles; the supervisor sees everybody's.

Assigning four hundred lines one at a time is why people give up and let everybody count everything, which is how two shelves get counted twice and the next one not at all. The wizard leaves already-assigned lines alone by default, because reassigning somebody's half-finished aisle mid-count is the other way to count the same stock twice.

Recount what disagrees

Set Recount over and any line whose difference is bigger comes back for a second count before anything is posted. Zero means every line that disagrees at all.

This is the one control that stops a mistyped digit becoming a write-off. When the second count is in, it — not the first — is what gets posted.

A count cannot be closed while lines are still uncounted, and cannot be posted while lines are still waiting for their recount. A count posted with holes in it is worse than no count.

Then post it

Post the count writes each counted quantity onto its quant and applies it the way Odoo does, so the stock moves and the valuation are the ordinary ones. The sheet stays as the record of what happened, who counted it and when.

A posted count cannot be cancelled: the adjustments are real stock moves by then, and cancelling the paperwork would not take them back.

What it deliberately does not do

• It does not replace the quant screen. One person fixing one shelf should keep using it.

• It does not let a count reach outside its own warehouse — that would post adjustments somebody else is responsible for.

• It does not post a line whose stock moved mid-count. See above.