Article Contents
Introduction
When looking at an item’s consumption, you want to verify your data is accurate.
If you're taking inventory on a consistent basis and adding all of your invoices into WISK, then a variance could be due to over-pouring, spillage, or theft.
Remember, Consumption = Starting Inventory + Invoices - Ending Inventory.
If you notice any large discrepancies, ask yourself these three questions:
Was this my beginning inventory count?
Did I receive this amount in this period?
Was this my ending inventory count?
If any of these values appear off, it could be due to the following reasons:
Invoice data entry error
Duplicate items
Miscounts (on either opening or closing inventory)
Unaccounted for returns/breakage
Invoice Data Entry Error
If your invoices value appears incorrect, check that you have:
Added all of your invoices received during the period
check for any open purchase orders to convert to invoices or add missing invoices for orders you didn't generate in WISK
if a purchase order has the status "Received with manual invoice", make sure the corresponding manual invoice was actually created. To learn more, see here.
Dated them correctly. When adding an invoice, it puts the current date and time. Make sure you adjust the date to fall between the starting and ending inventory. This is important if you're getting caught up on entering your invoices, you’ll need to backdate them. Make sure their dates are before the ending inventory’s start time. Otherwise, the invoice will appear in the wrong inventory period.
Verified the delivery matches the paper invoice. Make sure that you haven’t missed any items, and added the correct amounts. For example, if you received a case of wine, make sure you added it as 1 case, and not 1 unit.
Duplicate Invoices - If an invoice is added more than once, this will throw off your consumption calculation. You should archive any duplicate invoices.
To add an invoice or make changes to an existing one, please see:
Duplicate Items
Over time, your venue might have some duplicate items. There are a few reasons this can happen:
An item’s barcode may have been typed in manually and was missing a digit, so when it is scanned, it doesn’t find a match in your venue's items and searches the online database
Sometimes items come in cases, and the barcodes on the case and individual item are different. Often with beer bottles, the barcode on the bottle and the case may be different, or the bottles don’t have barcodes.
Adding items to an invoice by using the search function instead of scanning the item’s barcode
Regardless of how the duplicate item appeared in your account, this can throw off your inventory and invoice values and falsely indicate a variance.
Note: You can toggle on the "Added at" column to see the exact time when an item was added to your venue.
In the example above, the consumption is split between two items that are actually the same, which creates a variance.
If you have duplicate items, you can fix most issues by merging them.
When the items are merged, there is no longer a variance.
Miscounts
If the count for an item is inaccurate, your consumption is also inaccurate. The best time to correct a miscount is when reviewing your count before submitting an inventory. The second best time is immediately after submitting the inventory because you can still edit it to get an accurate count.
Common causes of miscounts include:
Missed stock in an area
Double counted items
Submitted a count as cases instead of units or vice versa
On the Variance Details page, clicking the information icon beside consumption shows you the consumption by area between the two inventories, as well as what was counted in each area. This is a quick way to see if an area was missed during an inventory.
To help reduce miscounts, you can use the List View when taking inventory counts to see what you submitted last time, in the order it was counted.
If there are easy to miss sections in an inventory area, consider creating another area for it specifically. That way you won't be able to submit an inventory count until that area has been saved.
To learn more, see:
Returns / Depletions
If an item is taken out of your inventory for any reason, and isn’t logged in WISK, it will be displayed as consumption. Make sure you are adding any returns, and using depletions to account for any breakage / corked / spoiled items.