Cycle Count Form and Schedule (Free Excel Template)

A cycle count form lists the handful of items you're counting this week, with columns for what you counted, who counted it, what the records expected, and the difference in units and dollars. The schedule behind it comes from sorting your items into A, B and C by how much money goes through them: A items, the few that are most of your spending, get counted every week, B items monthly, C items once a quarter. For a small kitchen that's about five items a week instead of everything at once. Below is the sort, the schedule and the form, filled in, free in Excel.

The short version

• Sort items by what you spend on them in a year. The top ones that add up to about 80% of the money are A.
• Count A items weekly, B monthly, C quarterly. Same day, same time, before production.
• Fill in Expected afterwards, in the office, so the counter isn't steered by it.
• Chase the differences that cost money, and write down what you found next to the number.
• TaroStack picks what to count for you, from what being wrong would cost. More on that below.

Step 1: sort your items into A, B and C

Take each item's yearly usage times its cost. Here's Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, with eleven items:

Four items are 79% of the money. That shape is typical, and it's why counting everything equally wastes most of the effort: a miscounted pack of labels costs 6 cents, a miscounted tub of taro paste costs dollars.

The cut-offs are a judgment call. I've used 80% for A and 95% for B, a sensible place to start. Put an item in a higher class if it's small in dollars but stops production when it runs out, or if it tends to walk off.

Step 2: the schedule

A items weekly, B monthly, C quarterly:

That's 260 counts a year, five a week on average. In practice it looks like this for the first weeks of the quarter:

Five items is ten minutes or so. Pick a day and a time before production starts, and keep it.

Step 3: the form

Net, the week is $12.65 short. Ignoring the signs, $13.81 was wrong, almost all of it in two items. And the last column is the one that pays: the taro paste gap turned out to be a recipe that understates what a batch really uses, which means every cost and every reorder that depends on that recipe was off too. One cycle count found it.

Counted is filled in on the floor. Expected is filled in afterwards, from the records, by someone else if you can manage it. That's what keeps the count blind. The variance formulas and how to judge which gaps matter are in the inventory variance formula, and the full-count version of this form is the inventory count sheet example.

The spreadsheet

Download the cycle count form. It has three tabs: Items, where you type usage and cost and the class works itself out; Schedule, a quarter of weeks; and Count form, which prints one page wide. It's a plain Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

The class formula doesn't need the list sorted. "Running share" adds up every item worth at least as much as this one:

Running share   =SUMIF($E$2:$E$12, ">="&E2) / SUM($E$2:$E$12)
Class           =IF(G2<=80%, "A", IF(G2<=95%, "B", "C"))

The cut-offs and how often each class is counted sit in three cells beside the table, so changing them re-sorts everything.

Does cycle counting replace the annual count?

For running the kitchen, mostly yes: every item gets counted several times a year, and the expensive ones every week. For your books, ask whoever does them whether cycle counts are enough or whether they want a full count at year end too; the year-end inventory count covers that one. If you do both, the year-end count goes quickly, because the numbers have been right all year.

Where this stops working

Two things wear it down. The first is Expected. To fill in that column, someone has to work out what the records say for each item, which means every delivery, batch and sale since the last count added up by hand, for five items, every week. The second is the schedule itself: usage changes, a new product makes sugar an A item, and the classes from January are wrong by June unless someone re-sorts them. A schedule that nobody updates turns back into counting whatever's easy.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack does the sorting and the scheduling for you, and goes a step past A, B and C. It suggests what to count next from what it would cost to be wrong, times how much has happened to that item since anyone last looked, so an item that's moved a lot rises up the list even if it's cheap, and an item that's never been counted is flagged on that alone. The schedule moves with your kitchen without anyone re-sorting a spreadsheet.

The Expected column disappears too. Every delivery received, batch recorded and sale made has already been adding and subtracting, so when you count on a phone, in the walk-in with no signal if need be, TaroStack shows each difference and its dollar value before you post it, while you can still go and look. From your own batch history it checks whether a recipe yields what it claims, and which ingredient is off, which is the taro paste finding, made without waiting for a count to stumble on it.

Counting is on every plan, from $49 a month; the recipe checks come with recipes and batches on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, and your items import from this spreadsheet. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

What is a cycle count?

Counting a few items at a time, on a schedule, instead of the whole inventory at once. Each item is counted several times a year, with the most valuable ones counted most often. It keeps the records right all year rather than once.

How do you do ABC cycle counting?

Rank items by yearly usage value (quantity used times cost). The items making up about the first 80% of value are A, the next 15% B, the rest C. Count A weekly, B monthly and C quarterly, and adjust for anything that stops production when it runs out.

What should a cycle count form include?

Date, item, class, location, counted quantity, who counted it, the expected quantity from your records, the variance in units and dollars, and a note on the cause. Leave Expected blank until after the count.

How often should you cycle count?

As often as the money says. Weekly for the few items that are most of your spending, monthly for the middle, and quarterly for the cheap long tail. For a small kitchen that's usually five to ten items a week.