Stocktake scope, caps and current limits

What a stocktake can cover today, and where the edges are. Read this before planning a large count - the variant cap in particular decides whether a whole-catalogue count is possible at all.

What you can scope a count by

• All products at the location
• Filtered products - by vendor, product type, category, tag or collection
• Specific products you pick individually

The 5,000 variant cap

A single stocktake covers at most 5,000 variants.

If your scope resolves larger, Stockie refuses to create the count and tells you roughly how many variants it covers. It does the same if you hand-pick more than 5,000 products.

Catalogues above 5,000 variants cannot be counted in one stocktake. If that is you, plan the work as several counts from the start rather than discovering it mid-setup:

• Split by vendor or product type and run one count per group.
• Run them as cycle counts, so each one updates only what it covers and leaves everything else alone.
• Count high-value or fast-moving ranges more often than the long tail, rather than counting everything at once.

That is a better operational pattern than a single wall-to-wall count anyway, but it is a constraint rather than a suggestion, so it is worth knowing before you begin.

Archived and draft products

Archived products are left out of a stocktake's scope. A count will not ask you to count something you have archived in Shopify.

Draft products are included. If you keep unfinished products in draft and do not want them in a count, scope the count positively instead of using all products.

Excluding collections

You can scope a count to a collection, but you cannot scope a count to everything except a collection. There is no exclusion rule.

Where you need to leave a range out, either scope positively to what you do want - by vendor, type or tag - or pick products individually.

Counting hardware

Stocktakes are counted with a barcode scanner attached to a computer, or by typing into the count field.

Phone and tablet cameras cannot be used as scanners. A wireless scanner paired to the device running the count is the supported route.

Printing a count sheet

You can print one. On the counting screen, Export count sheet gives you a PDF to print and write on, or a CSV to fill in on a computer, either for the current view or for everything in the count.

Untick Include Shopify on hand for a blind count, where the sheet does not show the expected figures.

The one manual step is coming back: counts written on paper have to be keyed in afterwards. The sheet cannot be scanned or uploaded back into the stocktake.

Shopify POS

Stocktakes are not available in Shopify POS. They run in the Stockie admin only.

Notes on a stocktake

A stocktake carries a name and a record of who created it. There is no free-text notes field for recording the circumstances of a count.