For owners of inventory-dependent businesses · 15+ staff
The Shelf Test:
You walked out to the shelf yourself, because you didn’t quite believe it. And it wasn’t there. Before you run another count or have another word with the warehouse manager — run these nine.
They take an afternoon, and they separate the causes more discipline will fix from the ones it never will.
Open the nine checks
Free · no card · all nine are on the next screen. We don’t email it — you’d only have to go and find it.
Nine checks · what each result actually means ·
the variance pattern that gives it away ·
and a scoring page that can tell you to fix your process instead
Not “review your inventory process.” Each one is a specific thing to ask your system or walk out and look at, what a good answer looks like, and what a bad one tells you. Most take ten minutes. Two of them you can do sitting down.
The sharpest check in the set, and the one almost nobody runs. After a count, everyone records how big the variance was. Where it lands is what tells you the cause — spread thin across everything means one thing, clustered on particular items or locations or movement types means something else entirely.
If you come out on the discipline side, it says so plainly and tells you what to fix instead. A diagnostic that can only ever recommend software isn’t a diagnostic — it’s an advert with questions in it.
The checks assume you hold stock, move it between places, and promise it to customers before you’ve picked it.
Wholesale & distribution
More than one location, hundreds of SKUs or more, and orders you commit to before anybody walks the aisle.
Light manufacturing & assembly
You build from components, so a small error upstream turns into a shortage downstream, usually on the day it matters.
Owners who’ve already tried counting harder
More cycle counts. Tighter receiving. A word with the warehouse manager. It got better for a quarter and then it came back.
Run them in any order. Each one is a question with a right answer.
The two-location question
Pick one item you hold in more than one place. Ask how many are in each, right now, without anyone leaving their desk.
The available-to-promise gap
Take an item with open orders against it and ask what you could safely sell today. This is the one that causes the short shipment.
The unit-of-measure conversion
You buy in cases or by weight and sell in singles. Ask where that conversion lives — and who does it.
The receiving lag
Time the gap between a pallet landing on the dock and it existing in the system. The answer is usually worse than the guess.
The assembly drain
Build or kit one item, then check whether the components came out of stock on their own or waited for a human.
The negative-stock question
Will your system let a quantity go below zero without stopping anybody? What it does here tells you what it thinks it is.
The variance shape
Your last count, read for pattern rather than size. Four shapes, four different causes, and only one of them is your people.
The returns path
Follow one returned item all the way through. Where it goes, when it becomes sellable again, and who decided.
The one-person question
Ask somebody who isn’t the usual person to produce stock by location as at last month end. Then watch what happens.
An afternoon if you do it properly, and you can do four of them in the next ten minutes without getting up. Check four needs a delivery to arrive, so that one waits.
No. It’s written for the person who runs the business, not for a finance specialist. Where a check needs something from the system, it says exactly what to ask for.
Because a good share of the businesses that come to us after a bad count don’t need one yet — and saying so now is a great deal cheaper for both of us than finding out six weeks into an implementation. Plenty of stock problems are handling and sequencing, and those get fixed with process and a fortnight of attention. We’d rather be the firm you remember than the firm you regret.
Clear Horizon Solutions Corp. — see below. We’d rather tell you before you hand over an email than after.
Nine checks · one afternoon
You already know the number on the screen and the number on the floor stopped agreeing. The only thing left to establish is why — and it is genuinely one of two answers.
Free · no card · opens on the next screen
Worth saying plainly
The Shelf Test was written by Clear Horizon Solutions Corp., a Microsoft partner. What we do is put small and mid-sized businesses onto Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central — a proper inventory and finance system — and most of our customers are wholesale, distribution and manufacturing businesses who arrived at us with exactly the problem on this page.
So yes: if the checks tell you your problem is structural, we are one of the places you could go about it.
That is precisely why there is a discipline verdict on the scoring page and why we tell you to use it. A test that can only return one answer isn’t worth your afternoon, and you’d have worked that out by check three anyway.