Thirty-five years of watching people count stock.

The same problem, four times over

The job has never changed: get an accurate count off a shelf and into a system, without a person retyping it. What has changed, roughly once a decade, is the machine you do it with — and each time, the software had to be rebuilt from the ground up rather than ported.

1991 — DOS and batch terminals

Monochrome portable terminals with a wand or a laser, a few hundred kilobytes of memory, and a serial cradle. Operators counted all day, docked the terminal, and the data was uploaded in a batch that evening. It worked, and for its era it was a revolution over a clipboard — but you found out about a mistake the next morning.

The 2000s — Windows Mobile

Colour screens, touch, and devices that could hold a real database. Counts could be checked on the device and validated against a downloaded product file. Still batch, still docked, but far more forgiving. Most of Australia's warehouses ran on something like this for fifteen years, and plenty still do.

Today — Android, wifi and the cloud

Warehouses have wifi now. That changes the deal completely: there is no reason for the count to live on the device at all. Stocktakes Online sends every count to the portal as it is made, so a supervisor watching a screen sees the warehouse being counted in front of them, and a device that gets dropped in a puddle takes nothing with it.

Every generation of this software was faster than the last. Only this one removed the gap between counting and knowing.

What we actually do

We are not a software company that also sells hardware, nor a hardware reseller that bundles an app. We do the whole job: the scanners, the labels on the racking, the software that reads them, and the phone call when something is wrong on the morning of a count.

• Stocktaking software — Stocktakes Online, built for Zebra Android devices.
• Zebra hardware — supplied, staged and supported.
• Labels and printing — bin locations, magnetic rack labels, product labels, printers and media.
• Setting it up — location schemes, data loading, and being there for the first count.

How we work

Most of our customers are Australian businesses with somewhere between one warehouse and a handful of sites. They do not have an IT department to hand and they do not want a project. They want to count their stock accurately, in a weekend, and get back to work.

So we keep it plain: tell us what you are counting and when, and we will tell you what it costs and what you need. If we are not the right answer for you, we will say so — a stocktake that goes badly is not a sale we want.