Your write-offs are logged. Nobody's counting them.

Last month someone on my floor engraved the wrong name onto a set of six bamboo cutting boards. Beautiful work, wrong spelling. They can't be sold. So we did what you do: booked a stock adjustment in Cin7 Core, knocked the units off hand, and moved on to the reprint.

That adjustment is now sitting in a log with a few hundred others. Breakage. A tile that came out of the kiln cracked. A ribbon roll that got water-damaged in storage. A count correction from someone who fat-fingered a receipt three weeks ago. All of it recorded, all of it accurate, and none of it adding up to anything I'd actually look at on a Tuesday morning.

That's the problem with write-offs. Cin7 Core captures them perfectly and tells you nothing.

The number that never gets a home

I run Personalised Favours, a Sydney-based manufacturer on Cin7 Core and Shopify. We work on a bill-of-materials model, which means most of what we sell gets assembled or personalized before it ships. Blank goes in, finished product comes out, customer's name on it.

Personalizing things at volume guarantees a certain amount of spoilage. Names get misspelled. An engraving laser drifts. A print lands off-center on the hundredth mug of a run. That spoilage is just the cost of doing custom work, and every operator who builds to order carries some version of it. Retailers who resell a sealed box have less of it, though they still break stock and still lose the odd pallet to damp in the corner of the warehouse.

We all share the same habit. We book those losses one at a time, as they happen, and we never see them together. Cin7 Core has no screen that says "you wrote off 3.1 percent of everything that moved this month, and here are the ten SKUs doing the most damage." The raw events are there. The number isn't.

So the write-off sits in the P&L at year-end as one lump — shrinkage, inventory adjustments, whatever your accountant calls it — long after you could have done anything about the thing causing it.

Wastage only means something as a rate

A single write-off tells you almost nothing. Fifty units gone sounds bad until you learn the SKU moved twelve thousand units that month. Five units gone sounds trivial until you learn the SKU only sold forty.

The useful figure is wastage as a share of total movement:

Wastage rate = units written off ÷ (units sold + units written off + units adjusted), over the same period

That denominator matters. You're measuring the losses against everything that actually moved through the SKU, not against your on-hand or some annual average. A product that turns over fast can absorb a few broken units without blinking. A slow mover that loses the same few units is quietly bleeding margin, and the rate is what tells them apart.

Run a real one. A ceramic ornament sells 380 units in a month. Over the same month you write off 22 to breakage — they arrive from the supplier more fragile than they look, and a few don't survive handling. Sold plus wasted is 402. Your wastage rate is 22 ÷ 402, near enough to 5.5 percent. One in every eighteen you touch, you're paying for and never selling.

Now put a cost on it. If that ornament lands at $4.10 and you're moving it at that rate all year, you're throwing away roughly $1,080 of stock on that one SKU over twelve months. Not a catastrophe. But it's one SKU, and it's the kind of steady drip you'd never chase because no single write-off is big enough to notice. The rate is what makes it visible.

Keep the number honest

There's a trap here, and it's worth naming because it quietly ruins the whole exercise.

When you do a physical count and push the corrections back into your inventory system, those corrections look exactly like write-offs. Same mechanism — a stock adjustment up or down. If your wastage figure scoops those up, then every stocktake dumps a spike of "waste" into the number that has nothing to do with breakage or spoilage. It's just the count catching up with reality. Leave it in and the metric turns to noise, and a noisy metric is one you quietly stop checking.

So stocktake corrections have to be separated from genuine wastage. A recount that adjusts a SKU from 100 to 94 because the shelf was miscounted is not the same event as six units you dropped and swept up, even though Cin7 Core records them almost identically. Tag them apart, or your wastage rate lies to you every count cycle.

What I actually watch

I don't look at the write-off log SKU by SKU. Nobody has time for that, and the individual events aren't where the signal is.

I look at two things. First, the overall wastage rate across the catalog, and whether it's trending up or down against the last period. A rising rate means something changed — a supplier's packaging got worse, or a new hire on the engraver needs another hour of training. Second, the ranked list of which SKUs are contributing the most waste right now. That's the short list worth investigating, and it's almost never the SKUs you'd guess.

Both of those come out of the same movement data your inventory system is already collecting. The events exist. They just need to be totaled, rated, and ranked, with stocktake corrections held out so the figure stays clean.

That's the layer Stocura adds on top of Cin7 Core. It reads the same stock adjustments you're already booking, separates real wastage from stocktake corrections automatically so the number stays honest through a count, and shows wastage as a percent of total movement on the dashboard alongside a ranked list of the worst offenders over the last two weeks. Losses show one color, stock found in a count shows another, so a good count doesn't masquerade as a bad month. You keep booking adjustments the way you always have. The difference is you finally see them added up.

Do this before your next count

Pull your stock adjustments out of Cin7 Core for the last 90 days and split them into two piles: genuine losses, and count corrections. Total the losses. Divide by everything that moved. That single percentage is a number most operators have never once looked at, and it will tell you more about the health of your handling and your suppliers than another afternoon staring at reorder points.

Then find the three SKUs doing the most damage and go look at why. It's usually one supplier, one process step, or one person who needs a hand. Cheap to fix, once you can see it.

The write-offs were never the problem. Not being able to add them up was.