TrackItWeekly

I've been a Director of Operations in multi-unit franchise QSR for 20 years. I run 15 stores across three brands. Over the years I've tried spreadsheets, monthly counts, daily counts, you name it. This is what actually stuck. I call it TRACK.

T — Track.**Count every item, once a week, same day. Not the fast movers. Not the expensive stuff. Every item. My managers do this on their phones now. Before this system, counts were taking 2 to 4 hours per store. One of my managers at a 3-brand location was spending 4 hours every Monday. She's now down to 1 hour. Another store wasn't counting at all. They were just guessing. Now they count in 30 minutes. The point is: you can't improve what you don't measure, and a store that's guessing isn't measuring anything.

R — Review. After the count, you look at what the data is telling you. What did you use since last week? What's your rolling average? What's sitting below your PAR level? If you don't know what PAR is, it's the minimum quantity you want on hand. When stock drops below PAR, that's when you order. The review step is where the picture becomes visible. Before this, my managers were counting and then doing math in their heads. The math was wrong a lot.

A — Act. Order what's below PAR. Not what you feel like ordering. Not what you ordered last week. What the data says you need. One of the biggest problems I saw over 20 years was managers ordering from memory. "I think we're low on cups." Then 20 cases show up and you're storing them for 6 months. We were spending money to save money. Supplier minimums would push managers to order more than they needed. The data from a weekly count tells you exactly what to order and nothing more.

C — Confirm. After the count and the order, you create a record. Who counted, when, what was on hand, what was ordered. This is the accountability layer. Not a theft detection feature. A paper trail. I caught a manager ordering extra product on the truck and not logging it. Not because I built an alert system. Because the data from the count didn't match the order that went in. That's what traceable data does. It surfaces things naturally.

K — Keep. Repeat next week. The rhythm holds. Accountability builds week over week. This is the part most people skip. They do one count, feel organized, and stop. The power is in the repetition. After a few weeks of consistent weekly counts, my managers started understanding inventory instead of just performing it. They started asking about categories, brands, PAR levels. They were learning how inventory works, not just counting boxes.

What changed for us:

Average count time across 7 stores went from about 2 hours 20 minutes down to about 40 minutes. Every store improved. The biggest drop was the 3-brand location going from 4 hours to 1 hour, because we grouped items by brand to match how she physically walks the stockroom. That feature exists because she asked me for it.

The method works regardless of the tool. You can do this with a spreadsheet and a notebook. The weekly rhythm is the thing. The data is the thing. The accountability is the thing.

I did build an app that automates the manual steps , because I got tired of the spreadsheet version falling apart every time a manager left. It's called TrackItWeekly. But the method is what matters. If you're struggling with inventory, start with TRACK. The tool is secondary.