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Cycle Count List with Variance Review

Example prompt: "Every Tuesday at 7am, generate the week's cycle-count list as a rotating slice of our SKU base weighted by ABC class and days since last counted. When the counted quantities come back in the sheet, draft a variance review for the buyer before any stock adjustment is posted."

The Problem

The annual full stock take is the event everyone dreads, and the reason it is needed is that nobody has been counting the rest of the year. The system says 240, the bin has 220, the SO went out short on Friday because somebody trusted the system and not the bin. By the time the year-end count surfaces the gap, the trail is cold — was it a mis-pick, a delivery short, a goods-in keying error, or a sample given away in February? The textbook answer is cycle counting, and most teams know it; the bit that does not happen is generating a sensible weekly list, capturing the counts, deciding what to do with the variances, and keeping a paper trail of every adjustment.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that runs every Tuesday morning and produces a weekly cycle-count list weighted towards SKUs that are overdue and high-value. A code step scores each SKU by days overdue against the frequency for its ABC class — A-class items get counted every month, B-class every quarter, C-class twice a year — and selects the week's target. An integration step writes the list to a new tab the warehouse can work down across the week, and writes the system quantity at issue to a log tab so a receipt or dispatch on Wednesday does not move the goalposts before the warehouse counts on Thursday. As counted quantities come in, a code step computes the variance in units, pounds, and percentage; lines within both thresholds auto-resolve, and lines outside go to a daily Gmail draft for the buyer. The workflow never writes to the Stock tab — that is the buyer's call, picked up by a separate adjustment workflow once the buyer has filled in the decision column. Glass Box preview shows the proposed weekly list, the system quantities being frozen, and the buyer's variance review draft before any of it lands.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (schedule): Every Tuesday at 07:00.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Read the 'Stock' tab, the 'Cycle Count Settings' tab, and the 'Cycle Count Log' tab for SKUs already in-flight.
  3. Step 2 (code): Score each SKU by days overdue against its ABC-class frequency, skip any SKU currently 'In progress' or 'Variance under review' on the log, select the top weekly_count_target by score.
  4. Step 3 (integration): Write the selected list to a new 'Cycle Count [YYYY-WW]' tab and append one row per SKU to the 'Cycle Count Log' with a frozen system_quantity_at_issue and count_status 'Issued'.
  5. Step 4 (integration): Post the count tab link and a one-line ABC breakdown in #warehouse on Slack.
  6. Step 5 (integration, recurring): Every 15 minutes between 06:00 and 18:00 on working days (a polling read of the week's tab — Google Sheets webhook triggers do not fire on cell-value edits in a way the workflow can act on), read rows where the warehouse has filled in counted_at since the previous tick; compute variance_quantity, variance_value, variance_percent and classify each line.
  7. Step 6 (llm): For lines flagged 'Variance under review', compose a one-sentence plain-language summary per line.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Once a day at 16:00, draft a Gmail to the buyer with the day's review lines and a decision column ('Adjust to counted', 'Recount', 'Investigate further') — never auto-send.
  9. Step 8 (integration): At 17:00 Friday, post the week's summary in #warehouse — issued, completed, rolled-over, awaiting buyer decision.

Integrations Used

  • Google Sheets — the Stock tab, Cycle Count Settings, the weekly count tab, and the Cycle Count Log
  • Gmail — the daily variance-review draft to the buyer with the day's lines requiring a decision
  • Slack — the #warehouse channel for the Tuesday list and the Friday weekly summary

Who This Is For

The buyer or inventory controller at a small manufacturer, distributor, or 3PL where the annual stock take is the only count that currently happens, the variances at year-end are six-figure surprises, and the team would cycle-count if they had a list to work down and a way to capture the variances without it turning into a second job.

Time & Cost Saved

Generating a sensible weekly cycle-count list by hand is half a day of buyer time done well, which is why most teams never do it. The workflow takes that down to zero. The real saving is the year-end stock take ceasing to be a surprise — variances become small weekly conversations the buyer can act on while the trail is fresh, and the year-end count becomes a confirmation rather than a discovery exercise. A single avoided line-stop traced back to a phantom stock figure pays for the workflow for several years.