Cycle count planner
Paste your item list and get an ABC classification and a cycle counting schedule for the year: which items to count on which day, with the valuable ones counted most often and the same number of counts every day. It runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
What is cycle counting?
Counting a small part of your stock every working day instead of all of it once a year. Over the year every item is counted, the valuable ones more often, and the count never stops the business. Errors are found within weeks of happening rather than at year end, when nobody remembers why they happened.
What is ABC analysis?
Ranking items by annual value, usage times cost, and splitting them into three classes. Typically a small share of items, the A class, carries about 80 percent of the value, B the next 15 percent and C the long tail. A items are counted most often because an error there costs the most.
How often should A, B and C items be counted?
A common starting point, and this planner's default, is monthly for A, quarterly for B and once a year for C. Raise a class's frequency if its counts keep finding errors, and lower it if they never do. Every number on the page can be changed.
What data do I need?
An item code and either an annual value, or an annual quantity used and a unit cost. A stock or sales export from your inventory system or ERP usually has all three. Paste it with its header row, or open the CSV file, and check the column choices the planner guessed.
How is the schedule kept even?
Every count an item needs in the year is given an ideal date, spread so that items in the same class do not bunch up. The counts are then dealt out across your counting days in that order, so no day carries more than one count above any other, and each item comes round at a steady interval.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. The planner runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste or open is sent to us or anyone else, and your last inputs are kept on your own device only.
Related reading
- Clicker counter: a free tally counter for doing the counts this schedule sets
- The questions you stopped asking
- What makes a better business question