Batteries, gaff tape and blades: keeping the expendables stocked next to the gear
The last 9V batteries went into the wireless packs at six o'clock and nobody had reordered. A par level per bin, one owner, and a count on the Monday walk-round.
In this article
- What to track, and what not to
- Par levels: one number per bin
- One bin, one owner
- The restock trigger
- Counting, and being honest about it
- Where the job actually goes wrong
- Where Itefy fits
Six o'clock, doors at half seven. The last four 9V batteries have gone into the wireless packs and the drawer is empty. Somebody bought a multipack three weeks ago; somebody else used most of it on a different job; nobody said anything, because nobody was supposed to.
You will be fine tonight. You will send somebody to a shop, or you will run three mics instead of five.
This is the expendables problem, and it is genuinely different from tracking equipment. A camera has a history and one of it exists. A roll of gaff tape has a quantity and no identity. Treating the second like the first is why most attempts collapse.
What to track, and what not to
The list is shorter than people expect. Track something if running out stops a job and it costs enough to notice.
For most teams that is fifteen lines or so:
- Batteries, by type — 9V, AA, and the proprietary ones for your packs
- Gaff, camera and electrical tape
- Media — cards, drives
- Blades, bits, abrasives
- Gloves, ear defenders, dust masks
- Fuses, adapters, the connector you always lose
- Cleaning supplies for the gear itself
Do not track cable ties. Or single screws, or the box of assorted washers. The moment your consumables list has two hundred lines, nobody counts it and it becomes decorative — and the fifteen lines that mattered are buried in the noise.
Par levels: one number per bin
For each thing on the list, decide the quantity that should be there when nothing unusual is happening. That is the par level, and everything else follows from it.
Two things make it work:
Write it on the bin. Physically — a label on the shelf edge saying 9V — par 24. Not in a system somebody has to open. The whole point is that a person looking at a nearly-empty box can tell at a glance that it is nearly empty relative to what it should be, which is a judgement nobody makes reliably by eye.
Set it so the reorder arrives before zero. Par level is roughly what you use in the time it takes to get more, plus a margin for the job that eats twice the usual. If your supplier takes a week and you use eight a week, a par of ten is a par that will fail you.
Adjust it twice a year. If you have hit zero, it was too low; if you have never come near it in eighteen months, it is too high and you have cash sitting on a shelf.
One bin, one owner
Every consumable line has one named person who notices. Not a rota, not "the team".
This sounds like over-organising fifteen boxes, and it is the difference between a system and a hope. The failure mode of shared consumables is precisely that everybody assumes somebody else has seen the level — and everybody is being reasonable, because nobody was told it was theirs.
For a small team one person owns all of it. That is fine and it is still a named person.
The restock trigger
Three approaches, in ascending order of reliability:
- The two-bin trick. Split the stock into two containers. Take from the first; when it is empty, order, and start on the second. It is old, it is physical, and it works without anybody remembering anything.
- A line on the Monday walk-round. Whoever does the weekly check reads the par levels off the bins and notes what is below.
- A threshold in a system that tells you. The par level is recorded, the quantity is adjusted as things are used, and something raises its hand when the level drops below the number.
The gap between the second and third is smaller than vendors suggest. The gap between the first and nothing is enormous. If you do one thing from this article, do the two-bin trick.
Counting, and being honest about it
Consumables will drift. People take a roll of tape and do not log it, and any system built on the assumption that every withdrawal gets recorded will be wrong within a month.
So: count rather than deduce. A physical count of fifteen lines takes five minutes on the Monday walk-round, and correcting the number to reality is a normal event rather than a failure. Systems that ask people to log every consumption are systems that get abandoned; systems that ask for a five-minute count every week survive.
Where the job actually goes wrong
Two failures worth naming, because they are not about the counting:
Buying at the shop instead of ordering. The emergency run to a supermarket for batteries costs three or four times the trade price and an hour of somebody's evening. Par levels are, mostly, a way of never doing that again.
Consumables bought against a job and never returned to stock. A job buys its own batteries, half get used, the rest go in the case and vanish into the general pool. Not a disaster, but it makes your usage figures fiction — which matters when you are setting the par level.
Where Itefy fits
Consumables sit in the same store room as the equipment and get used on the same jobs, so keeping them in a second system is how one of them stops being maintained.
In Itefy a consumable is an inventory item: a quantity rather than an individual thing, with a low-stock threshold — the par level — and a flag on the dashboard when it drops below. Stock is adjusted from a phone at the shelf, which is what makes the Monday count a five-minute job rather than a trip back to a desk.
They stay in the same register as the equipment, so the store room is one list. And they are deliberately treated differently: an inventory item has no checkout and no service history, because a roll of tape does not need one.
14-day free trial, no card. Fifteen lines and their par levels take about ten minutes to enter.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Same system, different treatment. They are in the same store room and used on the same jobs, so splitting them across two tools means one gets neglected. But a consumable is a quantity with a threshold, not an item with a history — do not give a roll of tape a service record.
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The quantity that should be on the shelf when nothing unusual is happening — the point at which you reorder, chosen so that the order arrives before you hit zero. It is a decision, not a calculation, and adjusting it twice a year is the whole method.
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No. Track what stops a job when it runs out and costs enough to notice. For most teams that is batteries, tape, media, consumable blades and PPE — perhaps fifteen lines, not two hundred.