Stocktakes & Adjustments
Stocktakes & Adjustments is where you reconcile what is physically on your shelves with what Shopify believes you have. It sits in the left navigation after Inventory Transfers. The most important decision you make is the count scope — it is chosen by which card you start from, and it is the only thing that decides which products a count is allowed to write down to zero. A count of ten products can never touch the eleventh. Every count is valued at your Shopify cost, so you can see not just how far off you were, but whether it mattered.
Four ways to start
Stocktake: Specific Products
A spot check
You add the products you want to count and nothing else is touched. Nothing is written down for not being counted, because there is no wider set to compare against. Use it for a shelf, a bin, or a handful of items you suspect are wrong.
Stocktake: Product Set
One vendor, type, collection or tag
Narrow the count to a vendor, product type, collection or tag. Alfred builds the list for you and fills the count sheet with every matching product — you do not add them by hand. Anything in that set you do not count can be zeroed, and nothing outside it can be touched no matter what.
Stocktake: Whole Location
A wall-to-wall count
Every tracked product at the location is in scope. This is the only count that can write down anything at the location, and it is the one to use for a full annual or quarterly count.
Perform Adjustment
No counting involved
Record a straight increment or decrement — shrinkage, damage, theft, a correction. You are stating the change, not the resulting quantity, and nothing is ever written down for being absent.
Key Concepts
Count Scope — what a count may change
Scope is the most consequential property of a count, which is why it is a card you click rather than a setting buried in a form. Specific Products can only ever change what you added. Product Set can change anything matching your filter, including products in that set you never counted. Whole Location can change anything at the location. The scope is fixed to the session and shown on the stocktakes list, so two finished counts of the same location are never ambiguous about what they were responsible for.
Products you didn't count
On a Product Set or Whole Location count, the review step shows a 'Not counted or input' card listing every in-scope product nobody entered a number for. You choose whether that set is zeroed or left alone, and you can keep individual rows out of the write-down with a per-row toggle. If anything will be zeroed, submitting requires typing a confirmation that names how many products it covers. Adding a product to a count is not the same as counting it — an untouched row is never treated as a deliberate count of zero.
Blind counts
Count visibility has two settings. 'Show expected' (the default) lets counters see what Shopify expects. 'Blind count' hides the expected quantity in both the summary card and the on-hand column, so what the counter writes down is what they actually found rather than a confirmation of what they were shown. Use blind counts when the variance itself is the thing you are trying to measure.
Every variance, valued
Twelve units missing is trivial on a $2 product and serious on a $400 one. Each line shows its Variance Value — the movement multiplied by the product's Shopify cost — and the summary reports three pairs: Counted, Uncounted and Total, each in units and in money, with the gain and the loss shown separately so a net near zero cannot hide a count where a lot moved in both directions. A product with no cost recorded is excluded from the value and reported as excluded, never counted as worth nothing.
Stocktake vs. Receive
In a Receive session you are adding new inventory — count 50 against 58 on hand and you finish with 108. In a Stocktake you are reporting what is there now — count 50 against 58 on hand and Alfred applies a -8 adjustment, leaving 50. 'I'm adding units' is Inventory Receiving; 'I'm correcting what's on hand' is a Stocktake.
Counting at a new location
If you count a product at a location where Shopify shows it as untracked, Alfred activates the inventory item at that location and sets the on-hand to your counted value. If the product is already stocked at more than 100 locations, Alfred cannot verify activation status and will ask you to activate it in Shopify Admin first, then retry.
Barcode scanning
A USB or Bluetooth scanner works in every session type. Each scan adds 1, or the carton quantity if the barcode is mapped as a carton barcode. Scans are serialized, so fast scanning cannot double-count. Set your unit and carton barcodes up in Product Configurations before your first count.
How to Use
Start the count
Open Stocktakes & Adjustments from the left navigation and click the card matching what you intend to do. Choose the counting location. For a Product Set, pick the dimension to narrow by — vendor, product type, collection or tag — and the values to count. Alfred names the session from the location, the date and the scope; you can rename it. Choose Show expected or Blind count before anyone starts counting.
Count
A Product Set arrives with its matching products already on the sheet. For a Specific Products count, add what you want via Add from catalog, barcode scan, or a CSV upload of SKUs. Enter counts by scanning, typing into the manual field, or uploading. Typing 0 is a real count — it says the shelf is empty — and is treated differently from a row nobody has reached yet.
Review
Step 2 shows what you counted, what you did not, and what it is worth. Check the Count Variance and Variance Value columns for lines that look wrong, and read the 'Not counted or input' card before doing anything else — that is the set at risk of being zeroed. Choose Zero or Ignore for it, and untick any row you want left alone.
Submit
If the count will zero anything, you will be asked to type a confirmation naming how many products it covers. Submitting pushes every adjustment to Shopify. The completed session keeps the same figures you reviewed — counted, uncounted and total, in units and money — and can be exported as CSV.
Tips & Best Practices
- ✓Pick the scope that matches your intent, not the biggest one. A Product Set count of one vendor cannot touch another vendor's stock, which is exactly what you want when you are counting one supplier's shelf.
- ✓Run cycle counts as Product Set counts by vendor or product type rather than counting the whole store at once — you get the write-down protection of a scoped count without a wall-to-wall shutdown.
- ✓Use a blind count when you are measuring how accurate your records are. Use Show expected when you are trying to correct known problems quickly.
- ✓Read the 'Not counted or input' card before submitting a scoped count. It is the only part of the review that can remove stock you never looked at.
- ✓Watch the Total net variance value, not just the units. A count can be a few units off and thousands of dollars wrong.
- ✓Products with no cost recorded are left out of the value figures and reported separately — if that number is large, your valuation is understated until you add costs.