Abstract

Stocks and physical assets, such as raw materials, products, plant and machinery, office equipment, IT systems, and so on, are value assets of a company. With companies today operating across multiple locations with various channel partners, ensuring all assets exist as per the books of record is a challenge for the operations and facilities functions. Stock audits help retail outlets in controlling several cost components. They help to check the level of opening stock and closing stock from previous periods, and thus help the company to account for short supply, damages, expired items, quality and quantity. Stock audits also check the billing process and ensure proper cash management. Thus, stock audits are required to be conducted in stores at least once in a month in order to avoid any frauds and to have proper control over stock. This study is a case study of a stock audit in the retail outlets of a leading player in the specialty bakery and confectionary sector in India. The study focuses on benchmarking the Damages/Returns and Variance in six selected outlets, in