An Inventory SOP for HVAC, Plumbing, and Appliance Companies

Write roles, not slogans

Warehouse receives and picks. Techs scan uses and returns. Dispatch checks truck stock before assigning. Office matches jobs to invoices and owns cores. Owner reviews the weekly exception list. Five sentences. Put them on the wall.

Slogans like “everyone is responsible for inventory” mean no one is. Names beat slogans.

The daily loop

Morning: dispatch glance, vans leave. Day: scans on every use and return. Evening: below-min report, restock, POs for warehouse zeros. That loop is the SOP. Everything else is a special case.

If a special case happens twice, it joins the loop. If it happens once, it stays a note.

The weekly loop

Monday: scan-vs-invoice exceptions. Friday: cores and extras off the vans. One min-stock tweak if the data screams. Do not hold a two-hour inventory meeting. Hold a twenty-minute one with a list.

Meetings without a list are how SOPs rot.

The monthly loop

Van audits on a timer. One warehouse aisle cycle count. A look at dead stock. A look at goodwill giveaways. Write three actions. Close last month’s three actions. Leave.

An SOP that cannot fit on two pages will not be followed. Cut until it fits.

Put the SOP where the work is

Office steps live in the office how-to. Tech steps live in the phone. FleetStock already splits those guides. Your written SOP should point at the screens, not rewrite them in Word.

When the software changes a button name, update one sentence, not a 30-page manual.

FAQ