For operations and finance teams, this has a practical consequence. The more the shop matters, the more its stock matters, and the harder it becomes to count.

Why a forecourt store is harder to count than it looks

A forecourt shop is small, but it combines several difficulties in one place. Many sites trade from early morning until late at night, some around the clock, so there is no natural closing time for a count. Staffing per shift is lean, and the same people serve customers, receive deliveries and manage the deli. Stock sits in very different places: on the shop floor, in a back store, in chilled and frozen units, behind the counter, and sometimes in an external cage or container. Deliveries arrive during the day, which makes a clean cut-off difficult.

Move the count through the shop

Because the shop cannot stop, the count has to be planned in zones that a small team can finish in one go. Quiet hours are used for the shop floor. The back store and cold room are counted when no delivery is due. Items behind the counter are counted at shift handover, when two people are present anyway. Each zone is opened, counted and closed before the next one starts. Sales made in a zone after it has been counted belong to the period after the stocktake. Sales made before belong to the period before. That simple rule only works if every zone has a recorded finish.

Connectivity deserves a line in the plan. Cold rooms and back stores are often the places where the signal is weakest. A count that depends on a permanent connection will stall exactly there.

Newly acquired sites

When a network grows by acquisition, the first full stocktake at a new site is also the first reliable picture of what was taken over. Product data may not match yet, and local habits differ. A standard procedure that can be applied to any site, with the same count lists and the same handhelds, shortens that first count considerably.

Own staff, with the right support

Store teams know their range and their shop. In a forecourt network, the question is rarely whether they can count, but whether they have the tools and the time. Between a fully self-managed count and a fully outsourced one, there is a middle route: the retailer’s own staff carry out the count, supported by inventory software, a counting app, rental handhelds for the count period and a support team in the background. Head office keeps control of the schedule and the results.

How COSYS supports forecourt stocktakes

COSYS, a German provider of mobile data capture and inventory solutions, supports self-managed and assisted stocktakes. With the COSYS Inventory Service, master data is taken over from the retailer’s system before the count. Head office creates count lists per zone in the COSYS WebDesk and transfers them to handheld devices or smartphones running the COSYS inventory app. Staff scan items and enter quantities where the stock is. The native app supports combined offline and online operation, with the exact scope depending on configuration. After the count, results are checked in the WebDesk and returned to the retailer’s system online or in batches, depending on the interface. Rental devices are available for networks that do not want to hold their own pool.

Planning stocktakes across a forecourt or convenience network? Contact the COSYS team for individual advice on inventory software, the counting app, rental handhelds and data transfer to your ERP. Arrange an appointment at vertrieb@cosys.de or +49 5062 900 0.