Keeping track of expiration dates without losing money to waste

Expired stock is money you already spent

A product that goes out of date does not cost you a sale.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 at the end you throw it away and pay for the bin. 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 A yoghurt that quietly went out of date at the back of the fridge gets binned during a clean out, months after anyone could have discounted it and got half the money back.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stock goes in front because that is where your hands are, so the old stock walks backwards until it is out of sight and out of date.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. Anything close to its date, and anything already past it, appears under Attention on the stock list, so the whole exposure is one tap away instead of a walk around the shop.

The alert arrives in the morning, and specifically in your morning: the check runs every hour and only sends to a workspace when it is nine o clock where that shop is, so 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.

One honest limit. The date lives on the product, not on a batch, so if you hold two crates of the same yoghurt with different dates, Invenva holds one date and not two. For a shop that sells through its stock in days that is the right simplification and it keeps the whole thing to one field. For a wholesaler sitting on many batches of the same line at once, it is not enough, and it is fair to know that before you rely on it.

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