Inventory Reports: Types, Examples, and How to Use Them

Inventory management report

A management report brings stock and sales information together so you can prioritize work. For example, filter for products with stock available but no sales during the last 90 days. That gives you a list to investigate for excess inventory; it does not, by itself, prove that every listed product should be discounted.

• Replenishment review: compare stock coverage with supplier lead time.
• Location review: check whether low stock at one location can be addressed by a transfer.
• Slow-stock review: compare available quantity with recent sales, accounting for seasonality.
• Data quality review: find missing SKUs, untracked quantities, or missing costs before calculating totals.

Start with a Shopify inventory report and keep the columns relevant to the decision. A shorter list of actionable exceptions is often more useful than an export containing every product field.

Inventory analysis report

An ABC report groups products by their contribution to a chosen measure over a defined period. The measure matters: ranking by sales revenue is not the same as ranking by profit. A high-revenue product can have a low margin, so do not read a sales-based A grade as proof of profitability.

How to read this example: identify the variant and SKU, then compare its ABC grade, available quantity, and total sales. An important sales contributor with little stock deserves a replenishment review. A lower-grade product with a large quantity may deserve a slower-stock review.

Confirm the grading period and thresholds in the report you use. Shopify's own ABC product analysis is based on revenue; do not assume that every ABC report uses a profit measure or the same settings. The familiar 80/20 rule is a planning heuristic, not a guaranteed distribution in your store.

Inventory forecasting report

A forecasting report uses sales history and planning assumptions to estimate how long stock may last and what to replenish. It is most useful when you can inspect the inputs, rather than treating the suggested order quantity as a certainty.

How to read this example: the Mipler table includes Total Available, Sales Velocity, Stock Covered / days, and Replenishment QTY. Review the stock-coverage estimate alongside your supplier's lead time. Check how the report's selected sales period and planning settings affect the recommendation.

• Sales velocity: units sold per day over the chosen period.
• Lead time: time from placing an order with a supplier until that stock is ready to use.
• Safety stock: a buffer for variability in demand or replenishment time.
• Reorder point: the stock threshold that triggers a replenishment order.

A simple planning example uses reorder point = average daily demand × lead time + safety stock. At 5 units per day, 10 days of lead time, and 20 units of safety stock, the threshold is 70 units. This illustrative calculation is not a claim about the settings of the sample Mipler report. See Shopify's reorder-point guide.

The reorder point tells you when to review replenishment, not necessarily how much to buy. Consider open purchase orders, supplier minimums, pack sizes, and your target coverage before deciding the order quantity. Sales during a stockout can also understate demand.

For the fields and setup, explore the Shopify Inventory Planner report.

Inventory stock report

A stock report answers what is recorded at each location now. Include product, variant, SKU, location, and clearly named quantity columns. Keep available, committed, unavailable, and incoming quantities distinct when those states are present in your data.

For a daily review, filter by location and sort available quantity from lowest to highest. Look at recent sales before prioritizing a low quantity: two remaining units of a slow seller may be less urgent than twenty units of a product selling ten per day.

A current report is also a useful starting point for a physical count. A mismatch may come from an unrecorded receipt, damage, a transfer, or an adjustment. Record the report's timestamp so that sales made during the count do not create a misleading discrepancy.

A table alone does not send low-stock alerts. If you need notifications or scheduled delivery, configure that workflow separately and check its frequency.

A stock report only shows the current state. If you need to see what changed and when - to audit an adjustment, compare a date in the past against today, or investigate a discrepancy - see our guide to viewing Shopify inventory history.

Inventory monthly report

A monthly report helps compare opening and closing stock and explain the movements between them. A month-end snapshot and a stock-movement report answer different questions: one shows the balance at a point in time, while the other explains how it changed.

For an illustrative physical-stock reconciliation, suppose you start with 100 units, receive 40, ship 55, return 5 to sellable stock, and write off 2. The closing physical quantity is 100 + 40 − 55 + 5 − 2 = 88 units. Account for transfers and other adjustments if they apply. A return that has not been restocked should not increase the stock balance.

Monthly inventory report sample

The same illustrative reconciliation can be presented as a movement report for one SKU and location:

Use a consistent location, cutoff time, and quantity definition each month. A list of current stock cannot reconstruct historical month-end balances without snapshots or the relevant movement history.

Shopify provides month-end inventory reports under Analytics → Reports, filtered to Inventory. Check its inventory report documentation for historical-data limitations. Use a Shopify dashboard to present the resulting trends once the underlying balances are comparable.

Inventory value report

An inventory value report adds a monetary measure to a stock quantity. For an operational view at unit cost, calculate quantity × unit cost for each SKU and sum the rows. State which quantity you used: valuing available units gives a different result from valuing all on-hand units.

How to read this example: the sample contains Total Available, Cost, Price, Total Cost, and Total Price. The Hera Pullover Hoodie row shows 45 available units at a $32 unit cost, giving $1,440 at cost. Its $48 selling price gives $2,160 at retail price. These are different measures; retail value is not realized revenue or profit.

Check for missing costs, mixed currencies, duplicate rows, and quantity exclusions before using a total. This sample is an operational report, not a guarantee of an accounting valuation or evidence that historical cost has been preserved.

See the Shopify Inventory Value Report for a closer look at the available fields and how to build the view.

Sales inventory report

A sales inventory report connects demand with remaining stock. Pair units sold during a specified period with current stock for the same SKU. Add returns and a clearly defined sales amount when those are relevant to the decision.

How to read this example: the Hera Pullover Hoodie sold 30 units against 45 available - healthy turnover. The Ariel row sold only 12 against 42 available, a much slower ratio worth watching if it continues.

For example, selling 60 units in 30 days gives an average of 2 units per day. With 24 available units, simple stock coverage is 24 ÷ 2 = 12 days. This assumes that demand stays similar and ignores future receipts. If sales velocity is zero, this calculation does not give a meaningful finite coverage estimate.

Use the result to investigate replenishment or excess stock. A promotion, a seasonal peak, or days out of stock can make a short sales window unrepresentative. Stock depletion is also not identical to sales: receipts, transfers, and write-offs can change inventory without creating a sale.

This same "sold against what you had" ratio is also known as sell-through rate - and a rate near 100% isn't always the win it looks like: it can just as easily mean you ran out of stock and lost sales for days.

Dead stock report

A dead stock report flags products with little or no recent demand - typically no sale in a defined window, such as 90 or 180 days. It usually pairs the last sale date with the remaining quantity, so you can see how much capital is sitting in items that aren't moving.

This is a distinct question from inventory value: a product can have a healthy total value and still be dead stock if none of it is selling. Read the last-sale-date column before acting on quantity alone - a recently restocked slow seller looks the same as a genuinely dead one until you check when it last sold.

How to read this example: the Nova Canvas Tote hasn't sold in 187 days and moves at 0.02 units/day - effectively dead. The Hera Pullover Hoodie row is included for contrast: 3 days since last order and a sales velocity of 1.00/day is a healthy, moving product, not dead stock.

For the full workflow - thresholds to use, how to separate seasonal slowdowns from genuine dead stock, and what to do once you've found it - see our guide to identifying dead stock in Shopify.

Cost of goods sold (COGS) report

Cost of goods sold is the cost of the units you sold during a period, not the cost of what you're still holding. Where an inventory value report answers "what is my current stock worth," a COGS report answers "what did the goods we already sold cost us."

COGS = units sold × unit cost at time of sale, summed over the period. If cost per item changes over time, most Shopify-connected tools use the cost recorded when the sale happened, not today's cost - check which one a given report uses before comparing periods. Shopify itself only stores one current cost per variant with no history, so a report showing "as of sale" cost is doing extra work to preserve that value; see Shopify's own note on this in its product cost documentation.

How to read this example: the Elisa EverCool Tee sold 58 units at a $18 unit cost, giving $1,044 in COGS - the largest share of the $2,208 total across these three SKUs. Compare this to revenue for the same period to get gross margin per product, not to the inventory value report's current-stock total.

Use COGS alongside revenue for the period to get gross margin, not the raw inventory value total - the two answer different questions and mixing them overstates or understates margin depending on which one you swap in.

Shrinkage report

A shrinkage report compares what should be in stock - based on receipts and sales - against what a physical count actually finds. The gap is shrinkage: damage, theft, misplacement, or a data-entry error, and the report itself usually can't tell you which.

The reconciliation is the same arithmetic as a monthly stock movement: expected closing stock is opening stock plus receipts minus shipments plus restocked returns minus write-offs already recorded. Shrinkage is the difference between that expected number and the physical count - anything not already accounted for by a movement you've logged.

Run this periodically, not just once - a single large shrinkage number is worth investigating for a specific cause (a bad receiving process, a high-theft SKU, a miscounted location), while small, consistent shrinkage across many SKUs points to a systemic counting or process issue instead.