Counting garments by reading swing tags is slow and produces errors nobody catches. Scanning is fast, and more importantly it removes the two mistakes that spoil a manual count: reading the wrong size off a similar code, and losing track of which rail has been done.
What you need before starting
Every variant needs an EAN in the system, because the EAN is what the scan resolves to. Garments without a barcode, or with a supplier barcode that was never recorded, have to be handled separately or they will scan as unknown. It is also worth freezing sales and deliveries for the duration, since a garment sold mid-count leaves the shelf after the system figure was taken.
| Before you start | Why |
|---|---|
| EANs recorded on every variant | The scan has to resolve to something |
| Sales and goods-in paused | Otherwise the baseline moves under you |
| Sections defined | So two people do not count the same rail |
| Scanner tested against a known item | Catches a mis-set scanner in the first minute |
How the count runs
Work section by section. Each scan increments the count for that variant, so five identical shirts in size M mean five scans rather than one scan and a typed quantity. Splitting the shop into sections and assigning each to one person is what keeps double counting out, and finishing a section before starting the next one is what makes a recount possible without redoing everything.
Unknown barcodes and differences
Two things come out of a count. Unknown barcodes are garments whose EAN is not in the system: usually stock received before records were tidy, or a supplier that changed a code. They need a product record before they can be counted.
Differences are variants where counted and recorded disagree. A negative difference is usually theft, an unrecorded sale, or a receiving error. A positive one is almost always a receiving error in the other direction. Neither should be written straight to stock: the value of a stocktake is in recounting the differences first, because the second count is where half of them turn out to be a missed rail.
How Agilo handles it
Agilo keeps stock per variant with the EAN attached, which is what a scanner needs to resolve a garment to a single size and color rather than to a style. Because supplier documents are read with the AI extracting each variant's EAN at goods-in, the barcodes on the shelf are the barcodes in the system, which is the condition that makes a scanned count faster than a manual one instead of slower.