Most small firms only ever count their tools twice: once for the insurance quote, and once after something big goes missing. It’s not laziness — the traditional stocktake is genuinely awful. Print a list, walk around ticking boxes, lose track halfway, give up. But if your kit is labelled, a stocktake is a *scanning* job, not a *writing* job, and a whole van takes minutes. Here’s the workflow.
Before you start: what you need
– Your tools labelled with QR codes and each assigned a home location (a van, a store, a workshop shelf). If you’re not there yet, do that first — Printing QR Code Labels covers the printing and Track Assets by Location the locations. You can absolutely stocktake the first properly-labelled van while the rest of the fleet waits.
– A phone. That’s it — the scanner runs in the browser, so anyone on the crew can do this, not just whoever owns the “office laptop”.
The stocktake, step by step
1. Pick a location and start a stocktake. Open the scanner, switch to stocktake mode, and choose the van or store you’re standing in front of. The system already knows what’s *supposed* to be there.
2. Scan everything you can see. Work shelf by shelf, scanning each label. There’s no ticking, no ordering, no “where was I” — every scan marks that item present. A transit van’s worth of kit is typically a few minutes of scanning.
3. Review the exceptions. When you stop, the result is a short list of what *didn’t* get scanned — the only items that need a human decision. For each one: it’s in another location (move it in the app, two taps), it’s with someone (check the activity history to see who scanned it last), or it’s genuinely gone.
4. Act the same day. This is the part that makes stocktakes worth doing at all. A tool flagged missing today was seen recently — the last job, the last van, the last person on its history. Chase it now and you’ll usually get it back; find out in six months and it’s a write-off. The full trail is on each asset’s record: Activity History & Audit Trail.
Make it a rhythm, not an event
The reason to do stocktakes with a scanner isn’t just speed — it’s that fast stocktakes happen *often*. A practical rhythm for a small firm:
– Weekly, 5 minutes: each van gets scanned Friday afternoon before the weekend.
– Per job: kit gets counted back in when a job wraps, while the trail is warm. Pairing this with a job checklist works well: Digital Checklists.
– Quarterly: the workshop and stores get a full pass, and the resulting report doubles as your insurance inventory.
Everything above works on the Free Forever plan — scanner, stocktakes and history included. Start free, label one van, and do your first five-minute stocktake this Friday.