"dpb" wrote in message
...
Molly Brown wrote:
Is it more profitable to stop stocking the shelves a month before an
inventory like Home Depot does so that you have less to count so that
you don’t have to pay as much in wages for the inventory personnel or
to keep stocking the shelves so that you make-up the time/money you
lose doing the inventory by selling as much as possible?

It's undoubtedly been worked out to a science...what is in inventory is
what is basis for tax as well so there's incentive there as well.

Not much.

You either have the $cash or the inventory it buys (or you have the
inventory and the extra loan balance). Either way, it's a wash.

But there are accounting rules for inventory which determine how is it
valued. These rules (e.g.: Last In, First Out; or Last In, Last Out) can
make a significant difference on the unit cost of items in inventory. When
wholesale costs change materially, the makers often change the UPC which has
the effect of eliminating the effect of which rule was used.


Most of the time in inventory is just identifying the item. It doesn't
take all that much more time to count, say, 20 items as, say, 5.

There is a great tax inventive to UNDERCOUNT inventory. The effect is to
postpone profits until the next tax year. That's way companies tend to farm
out the process: they can show the tax people they made a good faith effort
to get an accurate count.



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