[01]Bodega inventory
First, what a bodega's inventory is for
In Venezuela a bodega is the neighbourhood shop: an abasto or a minimarket with groceries, cold cuts, drinks, cleaning products and snacks. Keeping its inventory is not about having a pretty list. It answers three questions every week: what you have, what you need to order, and what went missing.
Without that, the owner finds out a product ran out when a customer asks for it, orders by memory, and never knows whether the money that's short went on a bad price, on goods that expired or on goods that walked out. The method below works with a notebook, a spreadsheet or a system. What changes is how much of the work you do by hand.
[02]Bodega inventory
The first count: the photo of where you start
[01]
Group the products into categories
Groceries (víveres), cold cuts, dairy, drinks, cleaning, personal care, snacks, bakery, fruit and vegetables. Ten categories or fewer. They let you count one aisle at a time and see later which group makes you money.
[02]
Pick a quiet moment and count shelf by shelf
Before opening or after closing, with nothing being sold. Two people help: one counts, the other writes. Count the storeroom too, and what's sold by weight (cheese, ham, vegetables) on the scale, in kilos.
[03]
Write one line per product
Name with its size ("Harina de maíz 1 kg", not "harina"), category, unit, quantity, cost and price. If two sizes sell at different prices, they are two products.
[04]
Write the cost in dollars
Use what it costs you to buy it again today, not what you paid months ago. If your supplier charges in bolívares, divide by the rate of the day you paid. That's the cost you price from (see how to price in dollars and charge in bolívares).
[03]Bodega inventory
If you keep it in Excel, these are the columns
A simple sheet does the job if you keep it up to date. One row per product, with these columns:
| Column | What goes in it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Name with size | Arroz 1 kg |
| Category | Its group | Víveres |
| Unit | unit, kg or litre | unit |
| Cost $ | What it costs to restock | 1.10 |
| Price $ | What you sell it for | 1.45 |
| Margin | =(Price-Cost)/Price | 24% |
| Stock | What you have now | 18 |
| Minimum | When to order more | 10 |
| Supplier | Who sells it to you | Distribuidora Los Andes |
Add a column with =IF(Stock<=Minimum,"Order","") and filter it before you call your suppliers. In Spanish Excel the formula is =SI(Existencia<=Mínimo;"Pedir";"").
The minimum is what you sell between one order and the next, plus a little cushion. If you sell 2 kilos of rice a day and your supplier comes every 5 days, the minimum is about 10 plus 3 or 4 for safety. Check it each month: what sells more needs a higher minimum.
[04]Bodega inventory
Keeping it alive: purchases, sales and weekly counts
The first count goes out of date the same day. To keep it true, three things have to happen:
- Every purchase adds. When the order arrives, check it against the supplier's invoice and add each product to its stock, with the new cost if it changed.
- Every sale subtracts. This is where paper and Excel fail: nobody writes down each sale during a busy afternoon. The usual workaround is to count again and assume the difference was sold, which mixes sales with losses.
- A short count each week. Don't count the whole shop every week: count one or two categories in rotation, and every week the products worth the most or easiest to take (cigarettes, liquor, cheese, ham, coffee). Compare what you counted with what the sheet says.
[05]Bodega inventory
Shrinkage (merma): name each loss
Shrinkage is everything that left the shelf without being sold. In a bodega it comes from five places, and each one has a different fix:
| Kind | Example | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Spoilage | Cheese that dries out, bread that goes stale, weight lost when slicing | Buy closer to what you sell; weigh again |
| Expired | Yogurt, cold cuts, medicine past its date | First in, first out: the oldest in front |
| Damage | A broken bottle, a split bag of sugar | Store heavy items low; check deliveries |
| Theft | From the shelf or from the till | Weekly counts of the risky products; one person per till |
| Internal use | What the family or the staff take | Write it down, every time |
Value each loss at its cost and add it up each month. It comes straight off your profit: $40 of cheese that dried out is $40 less you earned, even if your sales looked good. If shrinkage keeps growing in one category, that's where to look.
[06]Bodega inventory
How Arodeni Panel does it
Arodeni Panel is our POS and inventory system for shops in Venezuela. It follows the same method, but every sale subtracts on its own and every count is compared for you.
- Load your products from Excel or CSV with the columns above (name, category, barcode, unit, price in $ or Bs, cost, stock, minimum), or tick them in a list of about 120 products a bodega usually sells and type each price.
- Scan barcodes with the phone's camera or a reader, and print price labels with a barcode.
- Each sale takes its products off the stock, by the unit or by weight. When something reaches its minimum, it shows as low.
- Restock (Básico): what's running low comes grouped by the supplier who last sold it to you, with how much to order, and the order goes out by WhatsApp. When it arrives, it enters the stock with its cost.
- Stock counts: count the whole shop, one category or a suggested list (what's below zero, never counted or worth the most), blind if you want, from several phones at once that add up to the same count. Big differences are asked to be counted again before you approve.
- Every adjustment carries its reason (spoilage, expired, damage, theft, internal use), and the reports show what was lost at cost and take it off the real profit.
Products, inventory, counts and Excel import come with the Gratis plan, for one person, and it never expires. Restock by supplier, more people counting at once and the shrinkage report come with Básico. See the plans or how it works for bodegas and abastos.