What Is Dead Stock? What to Do With Obsolete Inventory?

If the inventory still has some fair market value, but its fair market value is found to be less than its book value, it will be written down instead of written off. When the market price of the inventory falls below its cost, accounting rules require that a company write down or reduce the reported value of the inventory on the financial statement to the market value. You can count on ShipBob’s processes, premium technology, and expertise to help you prevent inventory shrinkage and optimize inventory levels to meet demand and reduce costs. Other ways to sell dead stock include exploring new sales channels where there may be a market for these products and reaching out to partner companies that may find a use for the dead stock.

What Is an Inventory Write-Off?

With more visibility, you can find ways to optimise inventory to meet demand and avoid common inventory issues, such as overstocking. Known as obsolete inventory, holding on to purchased inventory that is no longer sellable can significantly harm your bottom line. A write-down occurs if the market value of the inventory falls below the cost reported on the financial statements. A write-off involves completely taking the inventory off the books when it is identified to have no value and, thus, cannot be sold.

Economic order quantity (EOQ)

In that case, you may need to pay the full amount for the container, even though your shipment is small. But in other cases, your freight carrier may be able to consolidate your LCL shipment with other LCL shipments, allowing you to pay a fraction of the freight container’s total cost. Omni-channel retailers need to have a unified approach to their businesses in order to stay competitive and be successful in this industry. The latter process is much more dynamic, capable of generating an updated forecast at any given time.

Why is excess inventory considered waste?

Due to these implications, it should be in your best interest to prevent excess inventory from stacking up. In this blog, we will take a look at the meaning, causes, impacts, and preventive measures of excess stock and how InventoryLogIQ can help. The other method for writing off inventory, known as the allowance method, may be more appropriate when inventory can be reasonably estimated to have lost value, but the inventory has not yet been disposed of.

• A contra asset account is reported on the balance sheet immediately below the asset account to which it relates, and it reduces the net reported value of the asset account.
• Real-time access to data across the supply chain is beneficial for real-time inventory management.
• The company may be purchasing excessive or duplicate inventory because it has lost track of certain items, or it is using existing inventory inefficiently.
• Changes in inventory mix, seasonal demand, population shifts, and competitor activity are just some of the factors that influence demand.
• It also provides an opportunity to routinely review unit costs to ensure that inventory cost accounting, not just item quantities, is accurately maintained.
• The application of a unique tag, or status, to an item may also create a new record.

By using inventory management software, as well as inventory scanners, you can better track expiration dates of stock units and help ensure products that expire the earliest are sold first. However, if you’re writing off large dollar amounts of inventory, it has to be disclosed on your income statement. A separate account such as inventory write-off expense account is included with the other inventory accounts.

Move from sales forecasting to demand forecasting approach

Ecommerce merchants can now leverage ShipBob’s WMS (the same one that powers ShipBob’s global fulfilment network) to streamline in-house inventory management and fulfilment. Since obsolete inventory is no longer sellable, it’s no longer considered an asset since it can’t be sold. In this case, your excess stock can be written off as a https://theillinois.news/navigating-financial-growth-leveraging-bookkeeping-and-accounting-services-for-startups/ loss on your financial statements. For example, a higher “premium” should be paid for the latter items to avoid the stoppage of production or losing a large order to an important customer. By assigning relative indices to these aforementioned factors, one can immediately decide the top 20% of items that the company should focus on.

Inventory management challenges

Furthermore, if dead stock is defective, you should be able to return dead stock to the supplier for free. According to Deskera, there’s an estimated $100 billion in dead stock in the retail industry at any moment. Generally, when inventory moves in and out of the warehouse at a balanced rate, it’s a good sign that business is going Navigating Financial Growth: Leveraging Bookkeeping and Accounting Services for Startups well. They can become obsolete because they are no longer fashionable or have become technology-defunct. According to Manufacturing.net, most companies hold between 20-30% dead stock (even in well-run companies). To reduce overprocessing, analyze every step in your pipeline and ask yourself if this adds value to the customer.

MPS = Master production schedule