Why we built STOK.

By Wihann Engelbrecht, Product Owner, STOK

Inventory has sat at the centre of almost every role I have held, whether managing stock behind a bar while studying towards a BCom in Supply Chain Management, overseeing warehouse and transport operations, or advising major global businesses on how to run their supply chains more efficiently.

In every one of those environments, the same problem turned up. It made no difference whether I was working with a small hospitality business or a global logistics operation. Knowing exactly what stock you have, where it is, and when you are about to run out is one of the few things a business genuinely cannot afford to get wrong. Get it wrong occasionally and it costs you money. Get it wrong repeatedly and it costs you the business.

What surprised me wasn't the problem statement. It was what small and medium businesses were being left to do about it.

What smaller businesses are left with?

When I looked at what the market was actually offering a smaller operation, there were two realistic options.

The first was enterprise-grade inventory software. These are good systems, because they are powerful, they are thorough, and they do exactly what they were built to do. But they were built for large operations with dedicated IT teams and budgets to match, and they are priced on that assumption. For a small retail shop, a growing restaurant, or a business running two or three locations, the monthly cost is difficult to justify against everything else that money has to cover.

The second option, and this is the one most small businesses end up on, was a spreadsheet, or a paper stock sheet. It is easy to see why. A spreadsheet is free, it is familiar, and someone in the business already knows how to use it. Nobody chooses it because they think it is the best tool. They choose it because it is the tool that is readily available.

The consequences follow fairly predictably. Human error creeps in, the recorded stock level drifts away from what is actually on the shelf, businesses over-order or run out without warning, and someone ends up spending hours reconciling counts that should have taken minutes. In many cases a person is paid, in part or in full, simply to keep that manual process alive. What nobody has is a clear picture, right now, of what is on the shelves.

I kept coming back to a simple question. Why does something as fundamental as knowing your own stock levels have to be either expensive or manual? I do not think it does, and that is why we built STOK.

What is STOK?

STOK is not an attempt to replace enterprise software, and it is not built for large corporations with dedicated technology teams and six-figure budgets. Those businesses are already well served.

STOK is built for the owner who wants to know, right now and from their phone, exactly what stock sits in their storeroom, on their shop floor, and at every location they run. It is for the manager who is tired of finding out that a product has run out only once a customer has asked for it, and for the operator who wants to move stock between sites, receive a delivery, or run a stock take without having to be standing in the building to do it.

What it gives you is real-time visibility across the whole operation, tracking every movement from the moment stock arrives to the moment it leaves your shelves, with alerts before you run out rather than after. It works on your phone, in a desktop browser, and it keeps working when your connection drops.

And it costs R29.99 a month.

Why R29.99?

We did not work backwards from a profit target. We started from what we wanted STOK to be, which is a tool that any business owner who has ever struggled with stock can put to work, whatever the size of the operation and whatever the state of the bank balance that month.

Inventory management is not a luxury feature. For most businesses it is the difference between trading profitably and trading blind. Nobody should be priced out of seeing their own stock, and at R29.99 a month, that barrier is gone.

Does this sounds like your business?

If you are running your stock off a spreadsheet, a paper count sheet, or your own memory, this was built with you in mind.

You do not need a complicated system, you do not need consultants to install it, and you do not need to be paying thousands a month for it. What you need is to look at your phone and know what you have, to be warned before something runs low, to see a delivery the moment it lands, and to know where your inventory sits across every location you operate.

That is STOK, for less than the price of a takeaway meal a month.

We will be opening access shortly, and when we do, you will have 90 days to use it for free.

In the meantime, head over to our product page to join the waiting list.

Wihann Engelbrecht is the Product Owner of STOK and holds a BCom in Supply Chain Management. He has spent years working in inventory, warehouse management and supply chain consulting, across industries ranging from hospitality to global logistics.