Most of my clients dont have time to do a stock take each month, although they are aware they need to for their annual accounts. I tend to ask them for a monthly stock estimate.

On advice from my Accountant we do a monthly stock take.

Many businesses only do a stock take once or twice a year because of the effort involved. In between the physical counts they rely on a book stock value, the stock balances you have multiplied by the cost prices of the products. When you are shipping a product and find a stock difference you should adjust the book stock at that point.

For on-going stock checks use a perpetual stock system where you check a few items each month to check the book stock accuracy.

One key advantage of moving from Sage 50 to Sage 200 is for its real time cost of sale calculation, meaning you can run a P&L any day of the month (or any hour of the day) to get a steer on your profitability (overall, at order level and at stock item level). It's quite clever in that it recalculates based on an estimated buy price and adjusts once all buy prices are known. It also updates the nominal ledger in real time meaning that's up to date too.

If you're a manufacturer then the cost of sale is of course the cost of production but the principle is the same for this too.