Inventory counts

Inventory counts are how you reconcile what Rundoo thinks is on your shelves with what's actually there — pick a scope, walk the aisles, enter counts, review the variance, then commit. Committing adjusts on-hand inventory and writes a journal entry.

Rundoo supports two methods of inventory count: a Full count for end-of-year / end-of-quarter store-wide walks, and a Cycle count for narrower scopes — one aisle, one vendor, one department — that you run on a regular cadence without zeroing out the rest of the catalog. Pick the scope when you start a new count (Step 1 below). You can run counts from the web POS or continue them in the aisle on the Rundoo POS mobile app.

In the POS mode, open the Counts left tab — every count you've ever run lives here.

Step 1: Start a new count

The top-tab strip — In progress, Completed, Voided — splits counts by where they are in the lifecycle. Completed is the running history of every reconciled count, each one listed with {Location} — {Name} and the timestamp it was committed.

To start a fresh count, flip to the In progress tab and click Start new inventory count in the top-right. That opens the New inventory count modal where you pick the location, give the count a name, and — this is the important decision — choose the scope.

⚠️ Scope by category or by specific products to avoid the "count the whole store" trap. A Full count that nobody finishes is worse than no count at all.

Full vs Cycle

The two scope buttons behave differently:

Scope	What it counts	When to use
Full	Every active product at the location. Rundoo prefills the expected on-hand for all of them, and any product you don't touch is counted as 0.	End-of-year / end-of-quarter reconciliation where you're walking every shelf.
Cycle	Only the products you add to the count. You choose them up front with Add products and only those rows get reconciled.	Regular short cycle counts — one aisle, one vendor, one fineline, one department — where you want to leave the rest of the catalog untouched.

The caption under the scope buttons spells out the Full gotcha: "Count all products; uncounted products will be counted as 0." If you pick Full and miss a product, Rundoo will zero it out on commit. For anything other than a planned full-store walk, Cycle is almost always the right call.

Click Create to drop into the count.

Step 2: Count the product

The count detail page has two top tabs: To count (products you haven't counted yet) and Counted (products you've already entered a number for). The tab counts update live — Counted (2) / To count (40) tells you at a glance how far along you are.

Three ways to enter a count on the To count tab:

• Type the number in the COUNTED column. The stepper arrows work too, but typing is faster for anything but small numbers. Tabbing between rows moves the focus down.

• Scan the barcode on the shelf. Scanning a product on the To count tab fills COUNTED with 1 and increments with each subsequent scan. The Rundoo POS App on a phone makes this the natural way to count — the page banner links to it at the bottom.

• Click Mark all as 0 for a subsection you've already walked. Useful when you've physically verified a whole shelf is empty and want to commit that in one click. ⚠️ This zeroes every row in the current visible filter, not just the ones you've physically checked — if you click it on an unfiltered Full count, you'll write off the entire location's inventory. Always filter the list down to the section you actually walked before using this.

The moment you enter a number on a To count row, Rundoo moves that row over to the Counted tab. Products not expected at the location — stuff that shows up on the shelf but isn't in Rundoo's inventory — can be added any time via Add products in the top-right. Added products get an Expected of 0, so whatever you count is pure variance.

Counting on the mobile POS

For any count that involves walking aisles rather than sitting at a register, the Rundoo mobile POS app on a phone is faster than the desktop. The phone-side flow mirrors the web one:

1. Open the count from the Rundoo mobile POS app and pick the count you started on the desktop.

2. Scan barcodes as you walk. Each scan lands the product on the Counted tab with a quantity of 1; scanning the same UPC again increments. The on-screen tab counts (Counted (12) / To count (304)) update in real time so you can pace the walk.

3. Search and add via the hamburger menu for products without a barcode handy — type the SKU, pick the match, set the quantity. Same outcome as scanning.

Desktop and phone share the same count, so a counter can start on the phone in the back room and a manager can review on the desktop in the office without re-entering anything.

💡 On a Cycle count, Add products is how you build the count in the first place — there's nothing in To count until you add something. On a Full count, every active SKU is already there waiting.

Step 3: Review the variance

Flip to the Counted tab to audit what you entered before committing. Each row shows five numbers that matter:

Column	What it means
EXPECTED	What Rundoo thought was on-hand right before the count was started.
COUNTED	What you entered (editable — you can still change it here).
VARIANCE	COUNTED minus EXPECTED. Green + means you found more than expected; red − means you're short.
COST	Unit cost, from the product's default cost.
VARIANCE($)	The variance in dollars — the P&L impact of this row if you commit.

The Total Variance: pill at the top-right of the tab rolls the dollar variance for every counted row — that's the number to sanity-check before you commit. A big positive total on a Full count usually means you forgot to count a section (it's being zeroed out). A big negative total usually means real shrink, a receiving error, or a miscount — worth pulling a second pair of eyes in on before committing.

The Notes box at the bottom is a free-text field for why the variance looks the way it does ("aisle 3 re-tagged after paint spill," "end-cap display not on the shelf yet"). Notes stay on the count record forever — useful six months later when someone asks why this week's shrink spiked.

Step 4: Commit the count

The bottom-right action cluster has three buttons, in order of increasing commitment:

• Void — throws the count away. Nothing adjusts, the count moves to the Voided tab. Use it when the count was a false start, not when you're unhappy with the numbers (bad numbers need a recount, not a void).

• Save draft — keeps the count in the In progress tab so you can come back to it. Use it when you've run out of time mid-count — the Counted tab still holds everything you've entered, and the To count tab still holds what's left.

• Complete — the commit. Rundoo adjusts on-hand inventory by the VARIANCE on every counted row (see the callout in Step 3 for why it's variance, not the full COUNTED number) and writes a journal entry to general ledger for the variance. The count moves to the Completed tab.

⚠️ Committing is one-way. The moment you click Complete, on-hand inventory is adjusted and a journal entry is posted. There's no undo — you'd have to run a second count to reverse the numbers. Review the Total Variance: and the top few absolute variance rows before clicking.

On mobile

The Rundoo POS mobile app has a Counts bottom-tab for continuing inventory counts in the aisle. It's continue-only — counts are started on the web POS and the mobile app picks them up.

The tab lists every in-progress count at the signed-in staff's location, one row per count with the location pill, count name, and the timestamp it was started on the web. Tapping a row opens the per-product entry surface where staff scan or type counted quantities, one product at a time. Finalizing the count back on the web finishes the run.

Inside a count, the list shows each expected product with the running variance (current count minus expected). The hamburger menu (top-right) lets staff search-and-add a product that wasn't on the expected list.

💡 Mobile-pos doesn't start counts. This is intentional — count setup (location, scope, expected list) is a desk task; counting itself is an aisle task.