Inventory Guide

On one site I reviewed a stock holding of £984,000. Nearly £197,000 of it was dead. A fifth of everything on those shelves would never be used. The business was writing off between £20,000 and £30,000 every quarter, and nobody tracked it as a single number because the management accounts buried it inside a larger one.

Nobody had done anything wrong. Every item had been bought for a sensible reason at the time. What was missing was the habit of looking.

This guide is about the cash sitting in your building. Stock is not parts, it is money you have already spent, converted into things, waiting to be converted back. Holding it costs somewhere between fifteen and twenty five percent of its value every year once you count space, handling, damage and obsolescence. Hold £400,000 and you are spending perhaps £80,000 a year for the privilege, spread across accounts where nobody sees it as one figure.

Twelve chapters that work in sequence. Finding your dead stock in under an hour with a report you already have. Stock accuracy, and why every calculation in your business is unreliable if the record does not match the shelf. Sorting by value so your attention goes where the money is. Lead time, the most powerful inventory lever there is, and why variability hurts you more than length. Safety stock, and the two questions that expose whether a buffer is insurance or a comfort blanket covering a supplier nobody wants to challenge. Reorder points and order quantities. Fixing suppliers at source rather than inspecting their output. Storage, flow and traceability. Why MRP disappoints, and the four foundations it depends on. The four numbers worth tracking. Then a week by week plan to start.

Then load it into your AI. Upload the PDF into a ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini project and it becomes a supply chain decision tool. Give it your stock list and it converts the problem into cash figures. It hunts the dead lines nobody has looked at. It refuses to let you carry safety stock that is really covering an unfixed problem, and it will not accept a lead time that came from a supplier quote rather than a record.