Before running any audit, it helps to know roughly what you are looking for. Here is a way to estimate the cost of missed restocks from three numbers you can get from your admin in a minute.
The three numbers
1. Refunds per quarter. Count them from the orders view, filtered to refunded, for the last 90 days. 2. Average refunded value per unit. Take a handful of recent refunds and average the line price. For apparel it is often between $40 and $90. 3. Miss rate. The share of refunded lines that were not restocked. If you have never checked, assume one in ten to start; you will replace it with a real figure after one audit.
The arithmetic
Refunds per quarter, times units per refund (usually a little over one), times miss rate, times value per unit.
For a store with 300 refunds a quarter at 1.1 units each, a one-in-ten miss rate, and $70 a unit: 300 × 1.1 × 0.10 × 70 = $2,310 per quarter of stock the store owns but does not know it can sell.
What the number is and is not
It is an estimate of sellable stock sitting invisible. Some of it will be found at the next stocktake. Some will be reordered from the supplier in the meantime, which is the part that costs real money. Some will be damaged and should have been written off rather than counted.
It is not lost revenue in a strict sense, and it is not a guarantee. It is the size of the question, which is enough to decide whether the question is worth twenty minutes a month.
Turning the estimate into a real number
Replace the assumed miss rate with a measured one. Export a quarter of refunds, mark each line restocked or not, and divide. Most stores find the real rate is either much lower than they feared or higher than they assumed, and either answer is useful.
StockReclaim computes the real figure on install from your last 60 days, priced per exception, and shows it free before you choose a plan. See pricing.