There are several ways to account for damaged, wasted, expired, spoiled, stolen, or otherwise "lost" inventory. This also applies to notating donations or samples.

Each industry will have a different preferred term, but no matter what you call them, we have a few different ways of handling them.

Stocktakes are a great tool that can be used to reconcile and get your inventory up to date.

We suggest creating a custom Reason for your stocktake by clicking '+' next to 'Reason' and naming it accordingly as a loss for your records! Examples of new Reasons could be "Expired Goods," "Spoilage," or "Theft," so you can accurately keep tabs.

Then, add your products to the Stocktake. You can manually enter the quantities that you are wanting to subtract of add to your counts by editing the discrepancy column directly. Remember to use a negative sign before any quantity that you are wanting to subtract or deduct from your "Actual' count.

This method is best tracked on the Stocktake Discrepancy Report. There, you can set the date range and organize by Reason and quickly see the total amount adjust for any particular movement, as well as the associated cost.

Otherwise, you can also use the Inventory Change Report. Just filter by Stocktake and look under the "Removed" column.

You also have the option to edit the quantities (via the Catalog tab -> Actions -> Edit on the inventory page) and add a note explaining the loss.

This method will track the losses directly on the Inventory Change Report. Just click on the Display button and enable the "Removed" column.

To track loss as part of your sales, we recommend running the products through the POS as a "sale" with a 100% discount.

This approach tracks the losses in your Discount Report and the inventory is accurately decremented.