Keeping track of expiration dates without losing money to waste

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 recognizes 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.

Expired 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A product that goes out of date does not just cost you a sale.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, you gave it shelf space, and in the end you pay to throw it away. In a shop with 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. A theft gets noticed. A breakage gets noticed. A yogurt that quietly went out of date at the back of the fridge gets thrown out during a cleanup, months after anyone could have discounted it and got half the money back.

Where the date actually gets lost

Almost never at the shelf. People are good at reading a date on a pack. It gets lost at the delivery door, where nobody writes the date down, and in the head of whoever knows that this crate goes before that one and is off today.

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stock goes in front because that is where your hands are, so the old stock walks backwards until it is out of sight and out of date.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

First expired, first out

The rule that works is not first in, first out. It is first expired, first out. They are usually the same thing and occasionally they are not: a delivery can arrive with a shorter date than what is already on your shelf, and the crate that came today has to be sold first.

In practice this means the date on the pack decides the order, not the day it arrived. That is a small distinction until the day it costs you a whole case, and it is the reason a system that only records receiving dates will still let you throw things away.

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 expired products is a record of money already lost. The useful alert arrives while there is still time to discount.
• 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 lunch rush, is a notification 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 an expiration date, picked from a calendar rather than typed, and it can be filled in when the goods arrive 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 around 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 expiration date, so two crates of the same yogurt 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.