High-Risk Merchandise Tracker

Why a high-risk list beats counting everything

Shrink is almost never spread evenly across your inventory. In most small businesses, 5–15% of SKUs cause the majority of losses. Those are the items worth counting often. A high-risk tracker focuses your time where shrink actually hides — instead of waiting until year-end inventory to find out something has been bleeding for nine months.

1. How to build your high-risk list

• High retail / low footprint: easy to conceal, valuable to resell (electronics, fragrances, razors, batteries).
• Regulated or age-restricted: liquor, tobacco, vape, lottery.
• Repeat shrink history: anything that has come up short in two consecutive counts.
• Common shoplifting targets in your category: ask your distributor or industry group.
• Items where a missing one is easy to miss: peg-hook goods, end caps, single-serve coolers.

Keep the list short. 25–75 SKUs is more useful than 500.

2. Counting strategy

• Count blind — do not show the counter the expected quantity.
• Two people on highest-value items whenever possible.
• Always reconcile against POS sales between counts, not against gut.
• Record every count, even when variance is zero — pattern is the point.
• If variance shows up, count again within 48 hours before investigating people.

3. Frequency recommendations

4. What's in the CSV

The downloadable CSV opens in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets with these columns:

• sku, description, category
• unit_cost, unit_retail
• count_frequency (daily / weekly / bi-weekly / monthly)
• last_count_date, last_count_qty
• current_count_qty, expected_qty
• variance_qty, variance_value
• counted_by, notes

Use the Download CSV button above to save a copy.

5. Example use cases

• Convenience store: daily count on tobacco and energy drinks, weekly on candy and chargers. Catches under-rings and back-door shorts within a day or two.
• Boutique: weekly count on designer denim, accessories, and fragrance. Trend the variance — a steady drift usually means fitting-room theft, not register error.
• Grocery / market: daily on baby formula, razors, and meat; weekly on health & beauty. Variance plus camera review is often enough to identify ORC activity.
• Hardware / specialty: weekly on power tools and copper. Pair with receiving audits to separate internal theft from delivery shortage.

This tracker is a starting point. Tune the SKU list, frequency, and variance thresholds to your store. Variance alone is not proof of theft — investigate process and counts first.

Built into My LP Portal

My LP Portal includes a high-risk register, count logging, and variance trending — so you stop maintaining a spreadsheet and start seeing patterns automatically.