ABC classification

ABC ranks every item at every location by how much it matters to you. The ranking then decides how much safety stock each item carries, and which items a review cycle looks at every week. Stokk recalculates it nightly, and you can rerun it on demand from Settings → ABC classification.

One letter or two

By default an item gets a single letter from one measure, usually turnover. A is the top 80% of that measure, B the next 15%, C the rest.

You can add a second measure, and then items get a two-letter code like AB: first letter from the first measure, second from the second. This is worth doing when money alone misleads you. A cheap item sold by the hundred is a small share of turnover but you cannot afford to be out of it. Rank on turnover and quantity together and it comes out BA or AA rather than buried in C.

Available measures are turnover, sale quantity, margin, cost of goods sold and cost price. Ranking by number of sale lines is not offered: sales are stored per day rather than per transaction, so it could only mean days with a sale, which is a different measure.

New and dead items

New items are held out of the ranking. You can define new either as an item with few selling days, or as one first transacted recently. The second is usually what you mean: the first measures how sparsely something sells, so an old slow mover counts as new.
Dead items, with no sale for however long you set, are also held out and marked X. Leave the setting empty for no dead class at all.

New and dead items count toward the split

By default they still contribute to the 80/95 cut even though they get their own class. If most of your range is held out as new, that padding distorts the split for everything else. The setting Leave new and dead items out of the ranking removes them, which is how AGR works, but it re-cuts A/B/C across the whole range. Turn it on deliberately, rerun ABC, and look at the spread.

Where the split is applied

Per location by default, so the same item can be A at one store and C at another. That is correct: a fishing rod is an A item at a coastal store and a C item downtown.

You can also split per category. Then every category gets its own A items, instead of the A list being taken over by your largest departments. If you want each aisle looked after on its own merits, turn this on.

What it changes

Each code has a service level, and that is the real output. A service level of 0.50 means Stokk forecasts the item but carries no buffer at all; higher means more cover and more stock on the shelf. You set these yourself in a grid on the settings page, so you decide how much protection an A item gets and how little a C gets.

This is your stock-holding dial

The gap between the top and bottom of that grid is what separates a lean range from an expensive one. Dropping C and dead items to a low service level frees real working capital; raising everything to be safe is how stockrooms fill up.

Stopping classes from flapping

Demotion hysteresis is how far past a boundary an item must drift before it loses its letter. Promotions always happen straight away. This matters most with review cycles, where a letter change also changes how much cover an item is ordered to, and you do not want that swinging back and forth week to week.

Overrides

ABC is calculated, not assigned, and there is no per-item override. If a class looks wrong, look at the history behind it first: a long stockout suppresses sales and can push a good item down a class.

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