Stocktakes Online is two halves of one system: an app on a Zebra scanner, and a portal that holds everything. The device stores nothing. That single decision is what makes the rest of it trustworthy.
Two CSV files, dropped onto the portal. The page parses them in your browser and shows you what it found — the row count, the first few rows, and any lines it had to skip — before a thing is saved. If the column order is wrong or a header got mangled, you see it then, not after your live catalogue has been replaced.
Printable barcode sheets from the same data: 280 parts and 65 bin locations — enough to try the scanner against real barcodes before anything is stuck to your racking.
Parts belong to the company; bin locations belong to a site, because A1 is a different shelf in each warehouse. Operators get a short username and a PIN they can type on a keypad with gloves on.
One active stocktake per site. Activating a second is refused until the first is closed — a count that may have been running a week does not get ended by somebody clicking the wrong button.
There is no admin area on the device and no data to clear. Settings holds the keypad and button preferences and nothing that can spoil a count. An operator cannot start or stop a stocktake. The scanner does one job.
Real screens from an MC3400, counting our demonstration site. What an operator actually does →
The first two are the same screen with the quantity typed or tapped, and an administrator picks which one an operator gets. The third is not a way of entering a number at all — it is a way of not needing one. They are easy to confuse in writing, so here they are running.
Bin, part, quantity, banked — ten seconds.
Scan the bin, scan the part, key the quantity. Lock the bin and the operator stays in that bay, working through it line by line without re-scanning the location each time. Part number 0 marks a bin as empty — checked, and holding nothing, which is a different fact from never having been visited.
No typing — minus, one, plus.
Not every scanner has number keys. On a touch-only device, typing a quantity means raising the on-screen keyboard — it covers the screen, and it takes longer than the count it is recording. This puts the quantity on a screen of its own instead: it opens at one, with a large plus and minus either side, and nothing to type. It follows the operator, not the device.
One jacket scanned five times — five records of one, not one record of five.
Every scan counts one, with no quantity step at all. Four scans of the same garment are four records of one, so a mis-scan is a single line to delete rather than a total to unpick. Type a number and it replaces the count on the scan you just made — “there are plainly twelve of these” — without touching the rest.
Scan any part or bin to see what it is. If a stocktake is running, it also shows where you have counted that part, or what you have counted in that bin — with descriptions, not just numbers. These work whether or not a count is under way, because a description lookup is useful regardless.
An operator can amend or withdraw counts they made themselves. Somebody else's are invisible to them. A withdrawn count leaves every total immediately, but the record stays for an administrator to see — a figure that vanished without trace is the one thing nobody could look into afterwards.
Most stocktake apps keep a copy of your data on the scanner and sync it later. It sounds safer. It isn't. It means the count on the device and the count in the system disagree for a while, and nobody knows which is right until the sync finishes — if it finishes.
Stocktakes Online does the opposite. Every lookup and every count is a live call to the portal. A count that did not arrive has not been recorded, and the operator is told immediately, while they are still standing at the rack and can do something about it.
The trade is honest: this needs wifi where you count. Prove it before you buy — take the printable check sheet into the aisles and load the portal on a scanner at the far end of the racking. Where that page comes up, the scanner will count. Where it does not, you want to know now and not on the day.
What you get for it is a system with one version of the truth, at every moment, for everyone looking at it.
A bay can be big enough that the same item sits in two places ten metres apart. Both piles get counted where they are found, and both counts stand. When an operator counts a part they have already counted in that bin, the device asks: is this a second pile, or a correction to the first?
Both counts stand, separately. That is a discrepancy worth seeing on a report, not something for the software to quietly average away.
Refused at the shelf, with the reason on screen. The portal holds many companies and every lookup is scoped to yours, so another client's part number is simply not a part number here.
Send us a parts file and a bin list and we will load them into a demonstration account, so you are looking at your warehouse rather than ours.
Setting up, loading your parts and bin locations, the accounting file and when to export it, running the count, and every report at the end. Plain English, with the actual screens.
Moving to a new warehouse this year? Count it out and count it in — the count that empties the old building is your stocktake.