Bulk feed inventory: from the bin to the bag to the register

To keep bulk feed inventory accurate, count every bulk product in one unit, usually the pound, and let your system turn everything else into pounds: a ton received is 2,000 pounds into the bin, a 50 lb bag sold is 50 pounds out of it, and a loose sale on the scale is exactly what the scale said. Bagging in the back room gets recorded as a small build that moves pounds out of the bin and into a bagged product, so the cost of the feed and the bag travel to the register together. Then, on a schedule you keep, somebody counts the bin, and the difference between the book and the bin goes into a short log with a reason next to it. Do those four things and your bulk numbers stop being a guess you make in January.

The rest of this guide walks one bulk ration from the truck to the counter, with a reconciliation table you can copy and a checklist for any POS vendor who says they handle bulk.

Bins are not SKUs

Most inventory software was built for things that come in a box with a barcode on it. Bulk feed arrives by the ton in a truck, sits in a bin or a pile of totes, leaves in amounts that change with every customer, and loses a little to the floor, the birds, and the weather along the way. Even a well-run feed store tends to know its bagged inventory to the bag and its bulk inventory to the nearest "it looks about half full."

Bin sensors that read the level from the top of the bin exist, and for a grain elevator or a mill they make sense. For an independent farm store, the problem is usually upstream of the bin: the system does not know what went in at the real weight, what came out in bags, and what got rung up loose. A sensor tells you the bin is lower than the book says. Clean records tell you why.

Count everything in one unit

Pick the smallest unit you ever sell a bulk product in, which for loose feed is almost always the pound, and make it the unit you count in. Every other way the product moves becomes a multiple of that unit on the same product record:

The trap is running a second item for the same feed so the bag and the ton each get their own price and their own count, which is the most common workaround in the business and the source of a lot of mystery shrink. Two counts for one pile of feed means every sale has to land on the right one, and they will not. Our units of measure guide covers why that goes wrong and how to set units up for feed, wire, and fasteners.

Receiving by the ton without counting it twice

Receive bulk at the weight that went into the bin, not the weight on the purchase order. If you ordered two tons and the mill's scale ticket says 3,960 pounds, the bin got 3,960 pounds, and receiving it as 4,000 plants a 40 pound shortage in your books before anyone has sold a scoop. The scale tickets guide explains gross, tare, and net if your deliveries come with a weight slip, and our guide to receiving and matching vendor invoices covers settling the difference with the mill when the bill says one thing and the ticket says another.

Pallets of bagged feed are the easier half. Received by the pallet or the ton, they land on the shelf as bags, and the conversion does the arithmetic. Make sure the person at the back door is receiving into the same product the counter sells, so a pallet of 50 lb bags and the bin of the same ration are not quietly treated as one pile when they sit in two places.

Bagging in the back is a build

When your crew fills fifty bags of a house blend on a Thursday afternoon, three things happen to your inventory at once: loose feed leaves the bin, empty bags leave the supply shelf, and a stack of finished bags appears by the door. If the system only records the last of those, the bin looks fuller than it is and the bagged product looks cheaper than it is, because the cost of the bag, the twist tie, and the label never made it onto the bag.

The clean way to record it is as a build. The loose feed and the empty bags come out of inventory, the finished bags come in, and the cost of everything that went in rolls onto the finished bags, so a 50 lb bag of your blend carries the cost of 50 pounds of feed plus the bag it sits in. That keeps your margin on the bagged product true, and it keeps the bin's book quantity falling at the same rate as the feed in it.

There is one judgment call. If you fill bags at the counter while the customer waits, you do not need a build at all: sell the bulk product in its bag unit and the pounds come straight out of the bin. The build is for bagging ahead of demand, when the finished bags sit on the floor with their own count for a week or a month before they sell.

A worked example: one ton of layer mash

Here is one bulk ration followed from the truck to the counter over a month. Every number is illustrative and kept round so the arithmetic stays visible.

Received. The mill delivers 2 tons of layer mash into bin 3 at $400 a ton. The scale ticket reads 4,000 pounds, so you receive 4,000 pounds at $0.20 a pound, for $800.

Bagged. On a slow Tuesday, the crew fills 20 bags of 50 pounds each, using 1,000 pounds of mash and 20 printed bags at $0.50 apiece. The build takes 1,000 pounds and 20 empty bags out of inventory and puts 20 finished bags on the floor at $10.50 each: $10.00 of feed and $0.50 of bag.

Sold. Over the month, the counter sells 14 of the finished bags and 600 pounds loose by the scale to backyard flock owners who want 25 or 40 pounds at a time.

Counted. Right before the next delivery, someone counts the bin and the floor.

The bin book is 4,000 received, minus 1,000 bagged, minus 600 sold loose, which is 2,400 pounds. The count says 2,340, and 60 pounds is 1.5 percent of what came in this month. That is small enough to absorb and large enough to explain, and the explanation is the useful part. If the crew weighs one bag in five during the next bagging session and finds they average 51 pounds, then 20 bags took 1,020 pounds out of the bin while the book recorded 1,000, and twenty of the sixty pounds just found their home. The fix there is a tighter fill, or recording the build at the weight that left the bin, not a bigger shrink allowance.

Counting the bin, and keeping a shrink log by reason

The best time to count a bin is when it is nearly empty, because estimating the last few hundred pounds in the cone of a bin is far more accurate than estimating the middle of a full one. Schedule bin counts the day before the truck, count bagged product with your regular cycle counts, and use whatever measure of the bin you trust most: weighing out what is left, a level reading against the bin maker's capacity chart, or a sensor if you have one. Keep using the same method each time, so the counts compare.

Then write the reason down while it is fresh. A short log by reason, kept month after month, turns "the bin always comes up light" into something you can act on:

This is the same thinking as the shrink guide, applied to a product you cannot hold up and scan. We are not going to quote you a "normal" bulk shrink percentage, because it varies with the ration, the bin, the climate, and the crew. Your own log, kept for a season, gives you a far better benchmark than an industry average would.

What to ask any POS vendor about bulk feed

Bring one of your bulk products to the demo and make the rep run it end to end. Our POS demo script has the full set of transactions to run, and these are the bulk ones:

1. Set up one product counted in pounds, ordered by the ton, and sold by the bag or the pound. One item number, not two or three.
2. Receive a delivery at a different weight than you ordered. Watch whether the bin gets the scale ticket weight and the difference is visible against the purchase order.
3. Record a bagging session. Feed and empty bags out, finished bags in, and the bag's cost includes both.
4. Ring 35 pounds loose and two bags on the same ticket. Then check that the bin dropped by 135 pounds.
5. Count a bin and show the variance in pounds and dollars. Ask how you would export it and where the reason gets written down.
6. Ask what happens to the general ledger when the count is completed. Shrink should land in an expense account, not disappear.

How Rundoo handles it

Rundoo is the AI-first POS for independent supply stores, running in 500+ stores across the US and Canada, and units of measure live on a single product record rather than as duplicate SKUs. You can add whatever units you count in, from bag and ton to pound and pallet, and each product sets its own defaults for stocking, pricing, sale, order, and transfer, so a feed can be ordered by the ton and stocked and sold by the bag, or counted by the pound with "Allow decimal quantities" switched on for loose sales. Counting, receiving, and transfers happen in the product's stocking unit. The farm and feed page shows the ton-to-bag setup on a real product.

Bagging ahead of demand runs through what Rundoo calls simple assembly: a purchase order against a dedicated build vendor that balances to zero, with the loose feed and the empty bags as negative lines and the finished bags as positive lines carrying the full cost of the batch. We wrote up the whole method, including the plain limits, in simple assembly in Rundoo. Rundoo is not manufacturing software, so there is no yield tracking or batch record, and a blend mixed and bagged while one customer waits is a poor fit for a build; sell that from the bulk product in its bag unit instead.

Counts run as a Full count or a Cycle count scoped by vendor, category, product line, or tag, so "all the bins" can be a tag you count the day before the truck. On the Staff app, several people can count at once on iOS or Android, and counts run blind. The count table shows Expected, Counted, Variance, Cost, and Variance ($), and completing it adjusts on hand and posts the dollar difference to an inventory-variance expense account. Export the Variance report before you click Complete, because the export is not offered afterward. One plain limit: Rundoo has no shrink reason codes, so the reasons in the log above live in your notes, not in the system. For the selling side, including pricing by the hundredweight, delivery tickets, and producer accounts, see selling bulk feed by the pound, ton, and delivery and our guide to farm charge accounts. Bring us your messiest bin and a month of tickets, and we will run it through Rundoo with you, which is a better use of an afternoon than staring into a half-full bin and guessing.