Quickly identify Inventory that is not selling
One of the best ways to identify slow moving and dead stock is to focus on items that have not sold for a while.
This Article covers the following:
- Run the Slow Movers dashboard in the Inventory v Sales Workbook
- Change the Filter dimensions to suit your business
- Visualise to see slow moving Inventory problems more clearly
- Other Filters to remove Items that are not sold individually
1. Run the Slow Movers dashboard in the Inventory v Sales Workbook
This Dashboard is filtered to report on:
- All Items in Inventory
- Where the Item has not been sold for 15 weeks (Last Sold Weeks is > 15 weeks); and
- Where the Item was last purchased more than 4 weeks ago (Last Purchased Weeks >4)
- this is to remove any new items that may have been recently added but have no sales history
Change the Order By field (click on a column) to sort the data
- Last sold Weeks (Descending) - to show the oldest items first
- On Hand Cost - to see where you have the most money tied up in slow moving goods
2. Change the Filter dimensions to suit your business
Simply change the Filters to focus your attention on your specific inventory if 15 weeks is too long or too short:
- Run the Slow Movers
- Click on the hamburger icon to display Filters
- Click on the Last Sold Wks filter and change to another date range
- Learn more about Filters
- Click Save to Save this as a new Favourite report that you can reuse over and over
- Schedule to email out automatically - this also creates a snap shot at month end to help with Inventory provisions
3. Visualise to see slow moving Inventory problems more clearly
Rather than a long boring list of hundreds of slow moving items, sometimes it is easier to see the key problem items using a chart.
Run the Slow Movers dashboard and focus your attention on:
- High $ value tied up in inventory not selling
- Dead stock where inventory has not sold in a very long time
Scroll down to see a list of items.
Click the three dots to open the full list of all items in a detail tab.
4. Other Filters to remove Items that are not sold individually
If you have raw materials or component parts that are not sold individually then these will also appear on this report as they have Not Sold in the past 15 weeks.
To identify and then filter to exclude these types of items:
- Add filter on Item is Sold field
- Filter to only include where Item is Sold = Y
- Learn how to Filter to exclude other fields e.g. Item Groups
NOTE: Limitation of using Weeks since Sold
If just one item is sold during the date range then this will reset the Last Sold date and the item will no longer appear on the report! Use the Inventory Cover report instead.