Quick count requires manual deduction on comitted

Retail & Point of Sale
1

I have a brick and mortar shop as well as online and have been using Shopify POS since 2018, and I’m noticing a pattern with recent updates. Many features that are supposed to improve efficiency seem to be shifting more manual work onto retailers or perhaps i’m not understanding how to use the updates correctly.

The biggest example for me is Quick Count - really excited about this feature but ..

The POS app displays the Available quantity and asks staff to count inventory. Naturally, we assumed this meant counting the inventory available for sale and it would update .

What I recently discovered is that Quick Count actually expects the total on-hand inventory, including committed items.

Committed items aren’t on the sales floor—they’re already sold, paid for, bagged, and waiting for pickup or shipment.

For example:

● Available: 4

● Committed: 6

A staff member counts the four items on the shelf and enters “4.” The result is -2 available, because Shopify deducts the six committed units.

The only way around this is for staff to stop counting, check every SKU for committed inventory, manually add those quantities, and then enter the adjusted number.

That isn’t a Quick Count.

Shopify already knows exactly how many items are committed because the orders are in the system. Why not let staff count what’s physically available and have Shopify automatically calculate the on-hand quantity?

This isn’t the only workflow that feels like it’s adding manual effort.

● The replacement for Stocky - for example the Purchase Order/ Receiving still doesn’t let us print price tags directly from received purchase orders, forcing additional manual steps or adding apps.

● The updated POS Returns screen hides the “Return to stock” option, making it easier to accidentally return damaged items to inventory.

While there have been great changes over the years these recent ones especially seem to point to the same issue: the software is asking retailers to do work that the system already has the information to do automatically. Is this just me or is it specific to brick and mortar ?

I’m not even sure how to phrase this as a question, but is anyone else running into the same thing? If so, have you found better workflows or workarounds?

2

Hey @2572Blue

The -2 makes sense once you see what Quick Count is actually asking for: it wants your total ON HAND count, meaning everything physically in the building, then it works out Available by subtracting Committed. Your committed items (the 6 bagged and waiting for pickup) are still physically in your shop, so they count as on hand too, which is why entering just the 4 on the shelf gives you 4 minus 6, so -2. The immediate fix is to count the bagged pickup items as well as the shelf and enter 10, not 4, and Available then correctly stays at 4. So it isn’t that Quick Count is broken, it’s that it expects a full physical count including committed stock, while your staff are counting only the sales floor.

That said, your underlying point is fair and there’s no getting around it: there’s no setting to “count only what’s on the floor and let Shopify add committed back”. The place to get them in front of the team is community.shopify.dev, not the Retail forum here, and you’ve written the case up clearly enough to paste it.

Hope that helps! If it did, a Like and Marking it as Solution goes a long way and helps others find the fix faster too.

Best,
Moeed

3

okay thank you for directing me to the right forum -i will post it there.