Recording Wastage and Stock Write-Offs
How to record damaged, expired, or lost stock as wastage in AskBiz POS — keeping your inventory accurate without creating phantom sales or inflated stock counts.
Key Takeaways
- Write-offs reduce your stock count without creating a sale — the product is consumed but not revenue-generating.
- Recording wastage accurately is essential for true margin calculation: unrecorded waste inflates your apparent margin.
- All write-offs are logged in the Audit trail with the reason, quantity, and the user who recorded them.
What counts as wastage
Wastage covers any stock that leaves the business without generating revenue: food that expires before it's sold, products damaged in transit or on the shelf, items used for staff meals or sampling, goods lost to shoplifting, or inventory destroyed in an incident. If you don't record wastage, your stock count stays artificially high — AskBiz thinks you have 50 units when in reality you have 38 because 12 were damaged. This discrepancy compounds over time and makes your stock take comparisons meaningless.
Recording a write-off
Go to POS > Operations > Retail > Wastage (or Stock Adjustments in some configurations). Click New Write-Off. Select the product from your catalogue. Enter the quantity being written off. Choose a Reason from the dropdown: Expired, Damaged, Theft, Staff Use, Sample, or Other. If Other, add a note explaining what happened. Select the Branch where the wastage occurred. Click Confirm. The quantity is immediately deducted from the branch's stock count.
The cost of wastage
AskBiz records the cost value of each write-off: quantity × cost price of the product. Over time, the Wastage Report shows your total wastage cost by product, category, reason, and date range. For food and beverage businesses, a wastage percentage of 1–5% of revenue is often considered normal; above that warrants investigation. For retail, even small amounts of regular waste — a few units of an expensive product per week — can materially erode margin. Seeing the cost in pounds rather than just units makes the problem tangible.
Wastage vs. stock adjustments
A write-off is a type of stock adjustment specifically for losses. AskBiz also supports positive stock adjustments — adding stock without a purchase order, for example when you receive a supplier credit or find miscounted goods. Go to Stock Adjustments and choose + (increase) or − (decrease). A write-off is a − adjustment with a formal reason attached. Use the Write-Off form for genuine losses to keep reporting clean; use the generic Adjustment form only for corrections to counting errors.
Reviewing wastage patterns
In POS Reports, open the Wastage section. Filter by date, branch, or category. Look for products with consistently high wastage — these might need smaller order quantities, shorter shelf lives accounted for in your ordering frequency, or different storage conditions. Products with high wastage and low margin are the most damaging to your business. Products that regularly expire before being sold are a clear sign you're over-ordering and need to revise your purchase order quantities.