Keeping on top of use-by and best before dates

What is in the file

One sheet, Expiry dates, with 500 rows: Name, Quantity, Unit, Expiry date, Location and Notes, followed by a Status column that fills itself in with Invenva's own words and rule. It says Expired once the date has passed, Expires today on the date itself and Expiring soon in the six days before it. A row turns red once its date has passed and orange in its last seven days, and sorting by Expiry date puts whatever has to go first at the top.

The columns carry Invenva's own names, so the import screen recognises them without any matching. The import takes each product's first row, so sort by Expiry date before you import and every new product arrives with its earliest date. Importing the whole file comes with the paid plans.

Out-of-date stock is money you already spent

A product that goes out of date does not just cost you a sale. It costs you the sale and the purchase. You paid the supplier, you carried it in, you gave it shelf space, and in the end you bin it and pay for the collection too. In a shop on thin margins, a handful of those a week is the difference between a good month and a flat one.

It is also the loss that hides best. Theft gets noticed. A dropped bottle gets noticed. A yoghurt that quietly went out of date at the back of the chiller turns up during a clear-out, weeks after the day it could have been reduced and half the money brought back.

Where the date actually gets lost

Almost never at the shelf. Reading a date off a pack is something everyone can do. It gets lost at goods in, where nobody writes it down, and in the head of whoever knows that this tray goes before that one and is off today.

The second place is the back of the shelf. New stock goes to the front because that is where your hands reach, so the old walks backwards until it is out of sight and out of date. Everyone knows it and everyone does it anyway, because rotating properly costs two minutes at the worst moment of the day.

Use-by and best before are not the same job

A use-by date is a hard stop. Past it the food is not to be sold, given away or eaten, and no amount of it looking fine changes that. A best before date is about quality: past it the product is legal to sell and usually perfectly good, and plenty of shops do sell it, marked down and clearly labelled. Treating the two the same is how a shop either throws away money it did not have to, or sells something it must not.

What both share is the rule that works: not first in, first out, but first to expire, first out. They are usually the same thing and occasionally not, because a delivery can turn up shorter-dated than what is already on the shelf. In practice the date on the pack decides the order, not the day it arrived, which is why a system that only records goods-in dates will still have you binning stock, and why the yellow sticker goes on while there is still a day left to sell it.

What to check in an app

Three questions decide whether dates will actually save you anything.

• Does it tell you before, or only after? A list of out-of-date products is a record of money already gone. The useful alert arrives while there is still time to reduce it.
• Does the reminder reach you at a moment you can act on? A notification at three in the morning, or in the middle of the lunchtime rush, is one that gets swiped away.
• Can you see everything close to its date in one place, without hunting product by product?

Doing it in Invenva

A product can carry a date, picked from a calendar rather than typed, and it can go in at goods in rather than later. On the Stock screen the row itself says Expired in red or Expiring soon in orange, and the Expired and Expiring soon filters gather them, so the whole exposure is one tap away instead of a walk round the shop.

The alert arrives three days before the date, at nine in the morning where the shop is, or the next morning when the date is closer than that. A shop in Istanbul and a shop in Lisbon each get it over their first coffee rather than in the middle of the night. Each product is announced once for a given date, so nothing nags, and changing the date arms it again.

Each delivery keeps its own date, so two trays of the same yoghurt with different dates stay two batches, and the item page lists every batch with how many are left. A sale takes the batch you pick; otherwise stock without a date goes first, then the earliest date, and expired stock last, while a write-off takes expired stock first. This is in the web app now and comes to the iPhone and Android apps with their next update.

The demo has dated products in it and needs no account.