# Inventory adjustment

> An inventory adjustment is a manual change to a stock number, made when what the system says does not match the shelf.

- Source: https://storestandards.com/glossary/inventory-adjustment/
- Updated: 2026-08-14
- Author: Marcus Ilori, Support lead, Store Standards

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Shopify records who made it and when. It does not ask why, and that is the
gap worth closing yourself.

## Use reason codes

Five is enough, and five is better than fifteen:

- Received, for a correction to a booking in
- Damaged, for anything unsellable
- Returned, for stock coming back to the shelf
- Transferred, for stock moving between locations
- Unknown, for everything you genuinely cannot explain

After a month of this, the pattern is obvious. If four in five adjustments say
"damaged", you have a handling problem, not a
[shrinkage](https://storestandards.com/glossary/shrinkage/) problem.

## Adjust after you have looked

Recount before you correct. Half the gaps found on a first pass are a box on
the wrong shelf, not missing stock, and an adjustment turns a findable box
into a permanent hole in the numbers.

## Where it goes wrong

Everything gets logged as "unknown". The adjustment history is then a list of
dates and quantities with nothing to learn from, which is the same as no
history at all.

The other one is adjusting instead of fixing. The same line gets corrected
every month, nobody asks what keeps breaking, and
[stock accuracy](https://storestandards.com/glossary/stock-accuracy/) never improves. Adjustments should
get rarer as [cycle counting](https://storestandards.com/glossary/cycle-counting/) beds in.

## Related terms

- [Cycle counting](https://storestandards.com/glossary/cycle-counting/): Cycle counting is counting a few products often, on a rota, instead of counting everything once a year.
- [Shrinkage](https://storestandards.com/glossary/shrinkage/): Shrinkage is stock you paid for that is gone without being sold, through theft, damage or errors nobody recorded.
- [Stock accuracy](https://storestandards.com/glossary/stock-accuracy/): Stock accuracy is how often the number on screen matches the number on the shelf, counted line by line rather than in total.