Spare parts inventory management
- Variance in units (negative is a shortfall)
- -86
- What the shortfall cost you to replace
- $1,075
- Count accuracy, percent of expected found
- 96.4
The arithmetic on these sheets is your own count: units, unit cost and reorder point in, variance and value out. Nothing is estimated and no industry average is applied to your numbers. Where a page states an outside figure it names the document it came from and links to it.
Spare parts are the hardest stock a small business holds, because the whole point of them is that they sit still. Ordinary stock that does not move is dead money; a spare that does not move is doing its job, right up until the one week it is missing. So the question a parts count answers is not turn rate, it is coverage: for each part, would you have it on the day the machine stopped, and what is it costing you to be able to say yes?
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Judge each part by what its absence costs, not by what it costs
A $14 seal that idles a truck for a day is a more important line than a $900 assembly you can get overnight. Rank the list by downtime rather than value and the holding decisions make themselves: carry deep on the cheap critical lines, carry none on the expensive ones your supplier stocks locally.
Set the reorder point from lead time, not from habit
The level to reorder at is what you use across the supplier's lead time plus the cover you want for a bad week. Enter the reorder point as a share of expected on the count sheet and it will tell you how far under you already are, which is usually the surprise.
Count the shelf, then count what left it without a docket
Parts rooms leak through the door, not through the books. The count tells you the variance; the interesting work is comparing it with the jobs that used parts in the same period. A shortfall concentrated in a handful of fast-moving lines is almost always pulls nobody wrote down.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
How many spares of a critical part should I hold? Enough to cover the supplier's lead time at your own usage rate, plus whatever a bad week looks like for you. The sheet turns that into a number: enter expected units and a reorder share and it gives you the level to buy at. What it cannot do is tell you your tolerance for the machine being down, which is a business decision, not arithmetic.
What do I do with parts for equipment we no longer run? Write them off the working list and decide separately whether to sell or scrap them. Leaving them in inflates the value of the shelf and makes every coverage figure worse. Federal property disposal rules are a useful model for the sequence even for a private business: identify, reassign if anything else uses it, then dispose.
Should van stock be counted with the main parts room? Separately, always. Van stock has a different usage rate, a different reorder point and a different person responsible, and folding it in produces one blended number that describes neither. Count each van as its own location and the main room as its own.
How do I handle a part that fits three machines? Count it once, in one place, and let the reorder point reflect the combined usage. The temptation is to allocate it across three lists so each machine looks covered, and that is how a business ends up holding triple what it needs.
Is a barcode scanner worth it for a small parts room? Usually not until the list passes a few hundred lines and more than one person pulls from it. Below that the scanner is a project that competes with counting, and a count you finish beats a system you are still configuring.
Will the Spare parts inventory management fit what you count?
Tell us what you are counting and how you count it today, and we will tell you whether Stocktaka fits before you pay for anything.