Gem Candies · Operating Procedures
Essential before launch Procedure 8 of 15

8. Inventory control

Owner
You (solo operation)
Trigger
Run on a fixed schedule (recommended: monthly, minimum quarterly) and immediately whenever an inventory discrepancy is suspected.
Approval
Not applicable — this is a reconciliation, not an approval step. Discrepancies feed into Procedure 7 or a documented write-off.
Current state — Shopify is on standby, so Grist Stones.Status is the source of truth this reconciliation counts against, not Shopify inventory. Once Shopify is live, reconcile against both.
A stone that cannot be found and cannot be explained by its movement history is logged as Lost or written off, not left silently In stock. That is what makes the discrepancy visible at the next count instead of being rediscovered a year later.

Procedure

  1. Physically count every stone currently marked In stock in Grist (Stones.Status) against the physical stones on hand. Check Stones.Location alongside it: a stone that is In stock but shows At jeweller or In transit is not expected to be in the safe, and counting it as missing would be a false alarm.
  2. For each stone temporarily held by someone else — a dealer, photographer, or lab — record who holds it, since when, and the expected return date, so it's accounted for even though it isn't physically on hand.
  3. Compare: any stone showing available in Grist but not physically present, or physically present but not showing available in Grist, is a discrepancy.
  4. Investigate every discrepancy individually — do not batch-adjust inventory without knowing the cause (sold outside the system, miscounted, lost, damaged, still in transit).
  5. Record the resolution for each discrepancy and correct Grist (and Shopify, once live) to match physical reality only after the cause is known.

Required evidence