Why your stock accuracy is 92% and nobody knows it

Ask a warehouse manager for stock accuracy and you will usually get a value figure: total system value versus total counted value, which nets a shortfall in one SKU against a surplus in another.

That number is almost always in the high nineties, and it is almost always useless. What predicts a stockout is location-level accuracy: for a given bin, does the system have the right item, the right batch and the right quantity?

Measured that way, most operations sit closer to 92%. The gap is not theft. It is unrecorded movement — the pallet shifted to make room, the short pick nobody flagged, the return that went back to the wrong bin.

Perpetual cycle counting closes the gap because it finds those errors while the person who made them is still on shift.