How to Do a Sheet-Materials Stocktake
You order four sheets of 18mm birch ply for Monday. Two of them are already in the rack, behind the MDF, under a half-built wardrobe side. Nobody was wrong exactly, nobody knew. That is a couple of hundred quid of board bought twice, and it happens in most shops more often than anyone admits.
What is a sheet-materials stocktake?
A sheet-materials stocktake is a count of every board you own, by material and thickness, recorded somewhere the whole shop can see. It covers full sheets, part sheets and offcuts worth keeping, and it records where each one lives as well as how many there are. The count is the easy half. The point of a stocktake is the record it leaves behind, because a number nobody updates is worth about as much as no number at all.
Most small shops run on memory instead, which works until it doesn’t. Memory fails in the two places it costs money: at the merchant, when you buy board you already own, and at the quote, when you promise a price on stock that walked out the door on last week’s job.
How often should you count sheet stock?
Count in full once a quarter, and keep a running tally in between. A full quarterly count is enough to catch drift for most one to five person shops without eating a working day every month. Pick a quiet morning, do the whole rack, and reconcile it against whatever your records claim you have.
Between full counts, the discipline that matters is recording movements as they happen: board in from the merchant, board out to a job, offcuts back to the rack. That takes seconds each time and it is the only thing that stops the quarterly count turning into an archaeology dig. If you only ever do the big count, your numbers are accurate on one morning every three months and drifting the rest of the time.
How do you actually run the count?
Work the rack in zones and count one material at a time, writing the number down before you move on. Split the shop into named areas (main rack, offcut bay, mezzanine, van) and record where stock sits, not just that it exists, because “we have three sheets of 12mm MDF somewhere” is not usable information when you are trying to cut on Tuesday.
For each material and thickness, record full sheets separately from part sheets. Set a size threshold for what counts as stock rather than scrap and stick to it: anything too small to yield a real part is firewood, and logging it just makes the list noisy. Note the supplier and what you last paid while you are there, since those prices feed straight into your next quote and a stocktake is the natural moment to catch that board went up again.
What do you do about offcuts?
Treat useful offcuts as stock, because that is what they are. A half sheet of 18mm birch ply is not waste, it is the next set of drawer bottoms, and the only reason it gets bought twice is that nobody counted it. Give offcuts their own bay, stand them on edge so you can read the sizes, and record the ones above your threshold with their actual dimensions rather than a vague “half sheet”.
That single habit changes what your optimiser can do for you, because a cutting plan that knows about your offcuts will use them before it opens a fresh board. There is more on working this way in our guide to offcut management.
How does Cutzilla keep the count true?
On the Pro plan, Cutzilla holds your sheet stock as live inventory rather than a spreadsheet you update when you remember. Materials sit in named locations with quantities and supplier prices, offcuts are tracked alongside full sheets, and stock moves through a clear sequence as it goes from the warehouse to a project to the saw, so the number in the system reflects what is actually in the rack. When you optimise a job, the layout can draw on the stock and offcuts you already own before it asks you to buy anything. The inventory walkthrough shows how it fits together, and the features overview covers the rest.
The stocktake still needs doing. What changes is that you do it once and then maintain it, instead of rediscovering your own stock every quarter.
Try it free. Cutzilla optimises your cut list in the browser, no install, any device. Start free. Want inventory and multi-quote? That is the Pro plan, and every new account gets 14 days of it free.