Glossary
Inventory ledger
Also called: stock ledger, movement ledger
Definition
A record of every stock movement — sale, return, adjustment, transfer, receipt — from which the current quantity is derived rather than stored.
The alternative is a single mutable quantity field that gets overwritten. It is simpler and it is the reason most stock discrepancies can never be explained: the number is wrong and nothing remembers how it got that way.
A ledger can be replayed. When stock looks wrong, you can find the exact movement that caused it, which turns a mystery into a five-minute correction.
Related terms
- SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)The unique code for one physically distinct thing you hold — a specific product in a specific variant, such as a red t-shirt in size M.
- Cycle countCounting a small slice of your stock regularly — weekly, by category or velocity — instead of counting everything once a year.
- Safety stockStock deliberately held back and not advertised, to absorb demand spikes and the lag between a sale and every channel learning about it.