Stock holding takes a lot of time and money to get right. The most popular method of prioritising your stock is to divide up your stock items using the ABC method and what is done is that your stock is divided up into three.
Group A
Is the best group, it probably gives up about 80% of your sales and generally makes up about 20% of your stock. This is the group you need to spend most of your time on.
Group B
Does about 15% of your sales and tends to make up about a third of stock.
Group C
Does about 5% of your sales and tends to make up about half your stock. This group you really need to think about so this is what here I am going to concentrate on.
First, you need to get a rough idea on what your overall stock holding; I used a year, but many use three months of history. What you are looking for it about half of this.
Now this is a quick step by step way of finding your Group C.
Go to reports and select stock, see the red arrow on the image here.
These are the criteria shown
I suggest that first you run this report with no options but the dates, to get a feel of what the report looks like and subsequently run this report again with the following options.
Where it is brown put the date range you decided.
Where it is blue enter in the size of the stock holding and sales. What I tend to do is ask for a list of all items that sell less then $50, not enough go to $200, and continue until I hit on about 50% of the stock. It takes about four runs. Since we use a very fast SQL, it takes only a minute or so to do a report on a decent computer.
If you wanted to do it by the department, it is purple where you would need to specify the type of stock.
Now start examining these stock items.
