BARCODE DATALINK Since 1991
Stocktakes Online · our own software

We wrote the counting software too.

Scan the bin, scan the part, key the count. It is on the portal before the operator has turned around — no spreadsheets to merge at the end of the day, and no wondering whether the figure in your hand is the figure in the system.

It runs on the Zebra Android scanners we sell, it is hosted in Sydney, and it is sold per stocktake rather than per year, because most businesses count once or twice and should not pay for the other eleven months.

Stocktakes Online →

It has a site of its own, and that is where the detail lives — how it works, what the reports look like, the pricing, and a live demo you can read without signing up for anything.

Why this page exists at all

Why a barcode company has its own software.

Fair question, and the answer is thirty-five years old.

Selling somebody a scanner is easy. Watching what happens to the count between the shelf and the spreadsheet is the part we have had a front-row seat to since 1991 — counts written on paper and typed up wrong, counts held on a device until the device is dropped, two people counting the same bay and nobody finding out until the variance report.

So from 2008 to 2024 we ran our own hosted inventory software, with a fleet of more than fifty Windows Mobile scanners out on hire to go with it. That product did more than this one does. It also ran on hardware that Zebra ended, on an operating system Microsoft ended, and we were eight years late moving to Android — which cost us customers and is written up properly rather than skipped over.

Stocktakes Online is what we built instead, from nothing, for Android. It is narrower than what it replaced and that is deliberate.

The scope, plainly

It counts stock. That is all it does.

Worth being blunt, because "inventory software" covers about ten different jobs and this one does exactly one of them.

It does

Stocktaking, properly

Scan a bin, scan a part, key a quantity. Nothing is stored on the device, so a scanner that is dropped, flattened or walked off with costs you a scanner and not a morning's counting.

Unlimited operators, sites cost nothing, and the count is live on the portal while the count is still happening — which is what makes a recount possible on the same day rather than the next one.

It does not

Receiving, put-away or picking

Not yet. The product it replaced did all three, and this one will get there, but it has not yet and we are not going to imply otherwise to win a job it cannot do.

If receiving and picking is what you actually need today, say so on the phone. That is an ERP conversation and we have had a lot of them.

Where it joins the rest of this

The same people sell you the scanner.

Which is the whole reason it is worth us writing software at all.

01

It runs on the hardware we sell

The Zebra Android range on this site is the hardware it was built for — and because we sell both, nobody gets to blame the other one. A scanner that will not scan and an app that will not read it are the same phone call here.

02

Or hire six and own nothing

If you count twice a year, buying scanners means they sit flat in a cupboard for eleven months. Six are available to hire, set up for your site before they arrive.

03

And something has to be on the racking

A count is only as good as what the operator points the scanner at. Bin and location labels are the other half of a stocktake and almost nobody thinks about them until the first morning — we make those too.

That is the argument, and it is the only one we make here. Plenty of stocktake software is written by people who have never fitted a scanner, and plenty of scanner resellers have no software at all. Doing both means the answer to "whose fault is this?" is always the same, and it is us.

Everything else

The detail lives on its own site.

Deliberately not repeated here. One place to keep right rather than two that drift apart — the same reason our repair rates and hire rates each live in one place.

What is over there: how a count actually runs, what the reports look like before you commit to anything, the pricing in full, which Zebra devices are compatible, a page that checks a scanner you already own, and a live demo — a real stocktake you can read without signing up or inventing a password.

Stocktakes Online → Open the live demo →

Counting soon?

Tell us what you are counting and roughly how much of it. Whether that ends in our software, somebody else's, or a recommendation to keep doing what you are doing, the first conversation costs nothing and usually saves an argument later.