Usage variance report

“We should have used twelve pounds of espresso this month — so where did the other two go?” That’s the question this report answers, one item at a time. It’s for managers and admins.

What it compares

For each item, it lines up two numbers in the item’s recipe unit:

• Theoretical usage is how much your sales say you should have used, costed through your mapped recipes.
• Actual usage is how much physically left inventory: your opening count, plus everything received on closed purchase orders, minus your closing count.

The difference is the variance. A positive number means more stock left the shelf than your sales explain — unaccounted-for shrink — and it’s priced so you can see the dollars, biggest bleed first.

It needs two full counts

Actual usage is only real between two physical counts. The report brackets your period with a full inventory count on each side and adds the deliveries in between. A full count is one submitted session that covers every required location. Counts scoped to a single location or a single vendor don’t qualify, since they only value part of the inventory and can’t bound the whole. If the report can’t find a submitted full count before and after the period, it says so and stops, rather than showing a number you can’t trust.

Why some items get excluded

An item is never silently dropped. If it was sold, bought, or counted in the period but couldn’t be compared — usually because it’s missing a count on one of the two boundaries, or its units can’t be converted — it’s listed as flagged with the reason, so you know exactly what the number does and doesn’t cover.

Explaining the gap

A variance isn’t automatically theft. It’s waste, over-portioning, spills, comps, or a recipe that doesn’t match what’s actually being made. The single best way to shrink the mystery is to log your waste: every event you record is a piece of the gap explained, leaving a smaller unexplained remainder to chase.