Inventory & parts

A part needs a name someone will recognise at the counter, a cost and a selling price. Cost is what you paid; selling price is what the customer pays. Klutch keeps both so it can show you margin, which is the number that tells you whether a fast-moving part is actually earning anything.

Use the unit you buy and sell in. If you buy oil in barrels but sell it by the litre, the part is a litre; otherwise every count and every bill is out by a factor somebody has to remember.

Name parts the way your staff would search for them, not the way the manufacturer's catalogue describes them. The catalogue number can go alongside; the name is what gets typed at eight in the morning.

A reorder point is the stock level at which you want to be told to buy more. Set it to roughly what you get through in the time a new order takes to arrive, plus a little slack. For something your supplier delivers the next day that is a few days' usage; for something ordered from Colombo it is more.

Klutch warns you when a part reaches the level you set. Parts with no reorder point simply do not warn you, which is the right answer for items you never intend to hold in stock.

The point is to be warned while you can still do something about it. An alert that arrives after a repair has already stopped for want of a filter has told you nothing you did not know.

Book a delivery in when it arrives, and book in what you actually received rather than what the supplier's invoice says. If three of five turned up, receive three. The missing two are a conversation with your supplier, not stock you should be carrying.

Receiving updates both the count and the cost. When a price has changed, this is where that gets recorded, so margin keeps being calculated against what you are paying now instead of what you paid last year.

Purchase orders and supplier records are part of the procurement feature, included from Full Throttle upwards. On Kickstart you can still receive stock and keep counts correct; what you do not get is the paperwork trail around ordering.

Scanning is faster than typing and it does not misread a part number under pressure. Where parts arrive with a barcode already on them, Klutch can use that one; for anything without, print your own label.

Label the bin or the shelf rather than the individual item for anything you hold more than a handful of. The bin does not get sold, so the label survives, and the person picking is looking at the shelf anyway.

Scanning works anywhere you would otherwise search for a part: adding one to a job card, receiving a delivery, or counting stock.

Count often rather than exhaustively. A full stocktake once a year finds errors nobody can explain any more; counting your fast movers monthly finds them while someone still remembers what happened that week.

Record what is genuinely on the shelf, not what you hope is there. Klutch shows the difference against what it expected, and that difference is the useful output: a part that is always short is being used without reaching a job card, which is a process problem rather than a counting one.

Correcting a count leaves a record of the correction, so a shelf that keeps shrinking can be traced instead of argued about.