We currently count A items every 60 working days, B items every 120 working days and C items every 240 working days.  We have a team of 2-3 responsible for cycle counting every morning.  I believe they count about 30 parts per day.

We cycle count A items twice annually, B items once annually, and C items as much as possible are expensed at the start and not counted.  If they represent too much inventory value to expense on the front end, then we count them once annually as well.  However, in order to meet these seemingly lax counting requirements, the counts must be greater than 95% accurate throughout the year overall else a full end of year inventory is required.

I prefer to count every day based to counting goals. example. A items 4 times a year, B items 2 times a year and C item once a year. To do this and not interrupt the daily work load, I had to calculate how many parts could be counted, reconcile and enter in the 1st hour of every day.  

Patrick….Hi. I am looking at a similar set up, however if I enter a cycle interval onto the Inventory Part record and run Create Count Report for a specific number of records (say 30), nothing pulls through onto the Count Report. (no data found). How did you start the cycle so that a suitable number of parts are included on each daily Count Report ? For your A items, what cycle interval have you entered and do your scheduled counts have a value in the “Number of Records to be Printed” field in the additional parameters ?

Hi Did you find out more about this? I am interested in this whole process and wondering best way to set it up. Thanks

Hello Dineshy, 

Here’s a quick script as to how this could be set up:

Indicate your cycle interval on the inventory part and flag the ‘cycle counting’ field. I.e., if the part should be counted 4X per year, then enter 60 as the cycle interval. Schedule a count report to run daily or with whatever frequency makes sense for your business. On the count report indicate that the ‘part selection’ should be for ‘Parts with cyclic counting.’ This will indicate to the system that it should only include parts where the ‘cycle counting’ flag on the Inventory Part is true.

Also indicate the ‘Number of records to be Printed’ to something like 30. this will limit the number of lines displayed on the count report, so it should represent a number that can be logically counted in the time allotted to the actual ‘counters.’ Suppose that you all of a sudden updated a thousand parts to be cycle counted. You wouldn’t want to have to count a thousand lines all of a sudden. If we set up the count report to limit us to 30 lines, then the system will select 30 lines at a time to be counted rather than a thousand. Since the parts are set up with a cycle interval of 60 days, these lines will not show up again on the next count; thus, a new set of 30 lines will be selected from the 1000 inventory records. 

Hi Jimmy, I like that solution. Do you have all parts that need counting set up with an interval on the Inventory Part or do you also count parts that are not set up? We for example count everything so have selected the include parts with and without cycle counting. Do you think that is a bad idea?

This line above:

“then the system will select 30 lines at a time to be counted”

I am really interested in what logic IFS uses to select these 30 parts. It doesn't seem to be random and appears to be selecting the parts with the most recent receipt date. What would be the logic there? Have you looked into that?

Thank you.

I haven’t been an IFS customer in a while, but what I like to do is only count parts that are cycle counted. I use the pareto principle by assigning cycle count intervals to my A class parts that are medium and fast movers. I wouldn’t include parts that are not cycle counted parts since these would be of little value to me because they represent low inventory value with limited movement. I only count those parts once per year during physical inventory. 

Regarding the logic IFS uses to count the 30 parts, my assumptions is the same as yours. I believe it is assigning records based on the latest last activity date which you can see in the Inventory Part in Stock window. Keep in mind that the system is looking at a Quantity in Location record so it may be likely that the report won’t capture all of the locations that part exists in. Only the locations that have a last activity date within the cycle interval of the part. 

Another thing I always do before a cycle count is remove the on hand record that are zero. There is a job you can run before a count report called ‘Cleanup of Inventory’ that can get the job done. Good luck!