What a manual stocktake costs.

What a stocktake costs today

The figures below are for a medium warehouse of 30,000 m², built from Sentispec's own cost model across deployments in Northern Europe.

A full manual stocktake at that size needs three to ten people for two to three days, moving pallets past a hand scanner at 50 to 100 an hour. That labour, priced as audit related work, comes to about €50,000 a year. On top of it sits the cost of finding pallets that are not where the system says they are: €100,000 to €200,000 a year in search labour at the same site. Add the two together and manual stocktaking, done properly, costs €150,000 to €250,000 a year before anyone has written off a single missing pallet.

The last row, labour efficiencies released at €100,000 to €300,000 a year, is not counted in the €150,000 to €250,000 total above, because it depends on what a site does with the hours a faster count releases. On most sites it is larger than everything above it combined.

Cost per pallet position

Cost per pallet position is the number most budgets are built from. The 30,000 m² model above assumes 30,000 pallet positions, one per square metre. That is the racking density the cost model was built on, so every figure in the table divides cleanly by 30,000.

Each of those two totals is the cost model divided by 30,000, rather than the rounded lines above added up. They are the two numbers to take into a budget conversation.

One caution before you carry that figure to your own site. Density is what moves it, and density varies more than floor area does. Cuxhaven, a manufacturing site, holds 5,000 pallet locations; Venlo and Roermond, combined, hold 85,000. Scale the €50,000 audit labour line across each and you get €10 per position at one end and about €0.59 at the other, a seventeen fold spread for the same style of count. A dense high bay retail site and a sparse low bay food site are not the same cost problem even at identical floor area. Use €5.00 to €8.33 as the model, then check it against your own position count rather than your own square metres.

The costs nobody counts

The €150,000 to €250,000 figure above is the labour anyone would recognise as "stocktaking cost" if you asked them to name it. The following rarely get named, and they are usually where the real damage sits.

• Write offs. A pallet the system expects but a count cannot find, reported as "Expected pallet missing in recording" once a site is on continuous counting, eventually becomes a write off if nobody locates it. The longer a discrepancy goes undetected, the more likely it ends this way rather than as a correction.
• Downtime. Where warehouse stock feeds a production line, a missing or mislocated pallet does not just cost a search, it can stop the line. One manufacturer's cost of downtime is €7,000 for every minute a line is stopped, which reframes a stock discrepancy as a production risk rather than a filing error.
• Agency and temporary labour. Stocktakes that need a team for two to three days are frequently topped up with agency staff to hit the date. That spend is usually booked as agency labour, not stocktaking, so it never shows up next to the number it actually belongs to.
• The lost pallet search. Already inside the €150,000 to €250,000 total, but worth repeating on its own: at €100,000 to €200,000 a year for a medium site, it is frequently the single largest line in the whole picture, and the one least likely to appear on a stocktaking budget at all. It has its own page: lost pallet search.

Where break even sits by warehouse size

Break even is not simply a function of warehouse size. It is a function of how expensive the manual alternative already was at that specific site, which size influences but does not decide on its own.

Notice the two ends of that table. Cuxhaven, at 5,000 pallet locations, is one of the smallest sites and also one of the two fastest break evens, because every minute of production downtime it avoids is worth €7,000. Geel, at 7,000 pallet locations, is a similar size and takes 6 months or more, because its value case is built on regulatory alignment and safety compliance in pharma, which pays back differently to avoided downtime. Size sets the scale of the manual cost being replaced. What is actually at stake when the count is wrong sets how fast that replacement pays for itself. The method behind every figure on this table, and what it does not control for, is published in full on the ten site benchmark.

What changes the arithmetic

Sentispec Inventory reduces stocktaking cost by 90% on average, with a range across sites of 80% to 95%. On the published cost model, that turns €150,000 to €250,000 a year of manual stocktaking and search labour into €54,550 to €64,550. That figure includes the Site tier's €39,550 annual fee, which covers support, maintenance, camera leasing and all software upgrades. There is no capital equipment required, because the recording unit is leased inside that fee and rides on a forklift the site already owns.

The one off setup fee of €9,950 covers calibration, WMS correlation and driver training across a five day deployment. A three month payback on that fee implies manual stocktaking costing about €79,000 a year at that site, roughly €6,600 a month. If your own numbers sit below that, your payback will run longer than three months, and it is worth saying so in any paper you write. The full method comparison against manual counting is on automated stocktaking against manual counting, the published price sits on the pricing page, and a step by step approach to building the internal case is in the business case guide.