Glossary
Inventory history
Also called: Adjustment history
Inventory history is Shopify's log of every stock change on a variant, with the time, the reason and who or what made it.
Open a variant, pick a location, and Shopify shows every change to that number in order.
What each line tells you
- When it changed, to the minute
- What it went from and to
- Why, if a reason was given
- Who did it, or which app did
The last two are the useful ones. A quantity going from 12 to 4 is not information. A quantity going from 12 to 4 because an app booked a sale at 09:14 is. The log is per location, so check you are reading the right shelf.
Use it before you adjust
When a count disagrees with the screen, read the history before you correct anything. Half the time the answer is there: a delivery booked twice, a transfer that arrived and never left, an app that ran a sync at midnight.
Correcting without looking turns a question you could have answered into an inventory adjustment nobody can explain.
Where it goes wrong
The log runs out. Shopify keeps it for a limited window, so a drift you notice at the annual count has usually aged out of the record that would explain it. That is an argument for cycle counting, where the gap is days old and the log still has it.
The other one is a wall of app-made changes with no reason attached, which makes the history technically complete and practically unreadable.
Related terms
Inventory adjustment
An inventory adjustment is a manual change to a stock number, made when what the system says does not match the shelf.
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.
Cycle counting
Cycle counting is counting a few products often, on a rota, instead of counting everything once a year.