Stock is cash you have already spent
A quantity on hand tells you nothing about whether it was a good idea. The useful questions are what that stock cost, how long it will last at the current rate of sale, and how much of your working capital is standing still.
Valued at cost, not at retail
Retail value flatters. Inventory is money that has already left your account, so Kaarobar values it at cost — the same cost per item that drives margins — and shows what proportion of your cash is committed to stock right now.
Cover, in days of real sales
Forty units means nothing on its own. Forty units against a variant selling three a day is under a fortnight of cover; against one selling two a week it is five months of dead capital. Cover is computed from what actually sold, over a window recent enough to reflect how the product is selling now rather than how it sold last winter.
Unknown stock reads as unknown, never as zero. An early version treated missing stock data as zero on hand, which filed the entire catalogue as urgently needing a reorder. Where the app cannot see stock for a product, cover says so — a gap you can see beats a confident wrong answer.
Where it connects
- Returns restock it. A parcel scanned back in returns its items to stock, so the figure reflects what is physically on the shelf rather than what the courier last reported.
- Cash flow uses it. Stock is one of the four things standing between COD collected and money available — see cash flow.
- Margins depend on it. Products with no cost price are listed rather than assumed free.
Questions merchants actually ask
- Does it change stock levels in Shopify?
- It writes back the restock when a returned parcel is scanned in. Everything else is read: Shopify stays the system of record for inventory.
- Does it handle multiple locations?
- Stock is read as Shopify reports it for the store. Per-warehouse allocation is not modelled — if that is central to how you operate, say so and it goes on the list rather than being implied here.