Glossary
Inventory adjustment
An inventory adjustment is a manual change to a stock number, made when what the system says does not match the shelf.
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 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 never improves. Adjustments should get rarer as cycle counting beds in.
Related terms
Cycle counting
Cycle counting is counting a few products often, on a rota, instead of counting everything once a year.
Shrinkage
Also called: Shrink
Shrinkage is stock you paid for that is gone without being sold, through theft, damage or errors nobody recorded.
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.