A Stock-Count Sheet for Every Property

Consumables fail quietly. Nobody complains about the missing spare roll until the night it matters, so the count has to be written down on a fixed day.

Last updated: October 14, 2026

A stock-count sheet is one page per property that records what you have, where it lives and when you last counted it. It exists because consumables don't fail loudly. They run out between two cleans, on a Sunday night, with a guest who's already unpacked. A dated count finds the gap a week before a guest does.

Key Takeaways

• Memory has no timestamp. What you remember is the last time you looked, not what's on the shelf.
• Four columns are enough. Item, location, count and par level cover every property you run.
• Split nights from turns. Paper and coffee track guests; bin liners and sponges track cleans.
• One fixed day beats good intentions. Twenty minutes on the same date each month is the whole system.
• A count is a forecast. Two months of sheets tell you what to buy before a season, not during it.

Why memory is the wrong inventory system

The storage cupboard is where memory goes to die. You stood in it last week, saw two spare rolls on the shelf, and closed the door feeling fine. What you remembered wasn't the stock. It was the last time you looked.

That's the first problem. Memory stores impressions, not quantities, and it stamps none of them with a date. A shelf you checked on Tuesday and a shelf you checked in March feel identical from the kitchen.

The second problem is what memory chooses to keep. It holds onto whatever was loud. A guest mentioned there was no coffee, so coffee feels low for a month. Nobody ever mentions the spare bulb in the hall cupboard, so it stays invisible until it's the only light in the entry.

The third problem is ownership. Once a cleaner carries supplies in their own bag, that stock is real but unlisted. You can't count what you don't know exists, and you can't tell whether the bag is full because the cleaner is careful or because you're paying for two inventories.

None of these failures announce themselves. There's no moment when the cupboard goes from stocked to empty. There's a guest at eleven at night holding an empty cardboard core, and a shop that closed an hour ago.

That's the actual cost. Not the item. The trip, the apology, the review that mentions it three weeks later. Consumables are cheap to buy and expensive to run out of, which is exactly the profile of something worth writing down.

A sheet fixes all three problems with one move. It puts a date next to a number, and it makes the invisible stock visible.

The four columns a count sheet needs

Almost every failed spreadsheet starts with too many columns. You add a supplier, a link, a price, a category, and by month three the sheet has become a project. Four columns survive because four is what you can fill in while standing up.

Item. Name it the way you buy it, not the way a guest describes it. "Toilet roll, two-ply, pack of eight" tells you what to reorder. "Bathroom supplies" tells you nothing and invites you to guess.

Location. The unit's own cupboard, the hallway store, the cleaner's bag, the car boot. Stock in the wrong place reads as zero when you're standing in the wrong room, and most "we're out" panics turn out to be "it's in the other building".

Count. The physical number, written before you look at last month's sheet. If you read the old number first, you'll write something close to it. That's not dishonesty. It's how suggestion works.

Par level. The count at which you act, not the count you'd like to have. If the par is four and you're at five, you're fine. If you're at three, you order today. The par is a decision you make once, calmly, so you don't have to make it again at eleven at night.

Two small additions make the page usable without turning it into a system. A date at the top, because a count without a date is an opinion. And a single notes line at the bottom, for the one thing that surprised you.

Keep the list short. If a guest would never notice the item's absence, it probably doesn't belong on the monthly page. Bulbs, batteries and filters can live on a seasonal list instead, checked twice a year.

Comparing count against nights sold

A count on its own tells you what's left. A count compared with nights tells you what's coming.

The arithmetic is deliberately plain. Take what you had at the start, add what arrived, subtract what's on the shelf now, and divide by the nights sold in between. The result is a per-night draw for that item. You don't need a percentage or a trend line. You need one number you can multiply by next month's bookings.

That number is what turns the sheet into a forecast. If you know the draw per night and you know how many nights are on the calendar, you know roughly what the month will consume. Ordering stops being a reaction to an empty shelf.

The split that matters most is between two kinds of stock. Some items track guests: paper, coffee, soap, water, the small things that leave with every stay. Others track cleans: bin liners, sponges, dishwasher tablets, laundry detergent. Both belong on the page, but they answer different questions.

Guest-scaled items should move with nights sold. Turn-scaled items should move with the number of turnovers. When a turn-scaled item starts tracking nights instead, something else has changed. Either more is being used per clean than you assumed, or some of it is leaving the building in someone's bag.

That second reading is uncomfortable and worth having. A sheet that only ever says "buy more" isn't measuring anything. A sheet that says "this line moved twice as fast as the nights did" is telling you where to look.

This is also where a count beats an app. You can't reconcile a number you never wrote down, and no dashboard knows what's in your hallway cupboard.

The monthly twenty-minute habit

The sheet only works if the day is fixed. Pick a date and stop negotiating with it. The first Monday, the morning after the last checkout of the month, the day the bins go out. Any rule works as long as the rule is the same one every month.

Twenty minutes is realistic for one property if the list is short. Walk the unit with the sheet and a pen, or with the sheet open on your phone. Count out loud. Write the number before you think about whether it's good or bad.

Then do the ordering in the same sitting. A count that turns into a separate task tomorrow turns into a task that doesn't happen. The value is in the pairing: see the gap, close the gap, before you leave the room.

One page per property, kept in the same place. Not a folder per building, not a tab per item. If you run several units, the pages should look identical, because identical pages let you compare them without thinking.

Three habits break the sheet, and all three show up in month two. Counting everything is the first. A page with sixty lines gets filled in twice and then never again, so start with the items a guest would notice within an hour of arriving. Counting without a par is the second. A number with no threshold is just a note, and the threshold is the part people skip because it needs an opinion. Treating the sheet as a record of the cleaner's work is the third. The moment a count becomes a performance review, the numbers get written to look good, and you lose the only signal you had.

Before the walk, it helps to know what the month actually did. LOCALSBNB answers plain questions about the period in read-only form, so you can ask how many departures fell in the month or what occupancy looked like without rebuilding it from four channel reports. The Home dashboard carries occupancy, average daily rate and RevPAR in one view, which is enough context to read the count against. If you'd rather ask a question than open a spreadsheet, localsbnb.com is the shorter path to the same numbers.

The habit compounds in a quiet way. By the third month you're not counting to find out what you have. You're counting to confirm what you already expected, and the confirmation takes ten minutes instead of twenty. Done properly, the sheet is boring. Same page, same day, same four columns. That boredom is the point, because a system you can run while tired is a system that survives a peak season.

FAQ

How often should I count supplies?

Once a month on a fixed date, not once a week when you remember. Monthly is enough to see the draw per night, and a fixed date is what makes two counts comparable.

Do I need software for a stock count?

No. A sheet, a pen and a date will do. Software helps with the numbers around the count, such as nights sold and occupancy, but it can't see inside your cupboard.

Who should do the count?

Whoever holds the stock, as long as the same person does it each month. If your cleaner counts, give them the par column too, so the page ends in an order rather than a question.

A single page per property is a small thing to keep. It's also the difference between replacing supplies on your schedule and replacing them on a guest's. When you want the month's nights and occupancy without the export, localsbnb.com is where that number already sits.

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This is general advice for hosts, and it isn't legal, tax or insurance advice. Rules and platform terms vary by place and change over time; check the current requirements of your local authority and the current terms of each platform you use.