Dead stock and slow movers

What the report actually measures

The Not moving report lists products that have stock on hand and have had nothing sold or used in the window, at least the last 30 days, ordered by the money sitting in them. It is a question about movement, not about age: something received yesterday that never sells appears just as readily as something bought a year ago.

Write-offs are not movement. Throwing away half a case of something nobody buys does not make the rest of it any less stuck, so a damaged or expired removal leaves a product on this list. A recount that corrected downward does count, because a count that found five missing is five genuinely gone.

Put a number on it

Suppose the list shows 40 units of a product with an average cost of $12.00. That is $480 of cash on a shelf, plus the space it occupies and the count time it takes every stocktake.

Compare it with what that money would do elsewhere. If a fast-moving line turns over its stock every three weeks at a 40 percent margin, $480 tied up in something that has not moved in three months is the cost worth talking about, rather than the purchase price you have already paid.

Choose a deliberate outcome

• Move it to the location where similar things do sell, rather than reordering there.
• Discount it, and record the sale at what it actually went out for so the realized margin tells the truth.
• Bundle it into a kit with something that does sell, so the components leave stock when the kit does.
• Stop buying it: clear any fixed reorder amount, and set its low-stock threshold to zero so it stops asking to be restocked.
• Write it off with the reason Damaged or Lost if it genuinely cannot be sold, so the loss is visible rather than hidden in a slowly drifting count.
• Archive it once it is gone, which keeps its history and SKU without cluttering the list.

Stop making more of it

Most dead stock is bought, not inherited. A fixed reorder amount that made sense once keeps ordering the same quantity whatever demand does; a coverage horizon, or simply reviewing the suggestion, adapts to what is really selling.

Watch the pairing of a large pack size and a slow line: rounding up to a whole case is right for a supplier and wrong for something that sells one a month. A second source with a smaller pack, even at a higher unit price, can be the cheaper choice once the stock that never sells is counted.