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Consignment is a good arrangement badly recorded almost everywhere it exists. The stock is physically with you, so it goes in the count; it is not yours, so it should not be in the valuation. Both of those are true at once.
The paperwork around an import got lighter this year. The arithmetic behind it did not, and it is the arithmetic that determines whether the line you think is your best seller is actually making money.
One of the most ordinary things a shop does is also one of the most common sources of a wrong stock figure: buying in one unit and selling in another.
Your sales are reasonably steady. Your purchase orders are not. That gap is not a failure of discipline on your part — it is a well-documented property of supply chains, and it has a name and four causes.
Everyone agrees stockouts cost sales. Far fewer people can say how much, or where the sale goes instead — and the answer is more useful than the agreement, because most of it is invisible in your own till.
