How to find your deadstock in 30 minutes
A short guide to spotting the SKUs that are silently eating your working capital. Run it yourself in 30 minutes, or have us run it with you.
If you're an operator running anything past $1M in inventory, somewhere between 5% and 15% of your SKU count is deadstock. That cash is sitting in your warehouse, not in your bank, and the longer it stays there the lower the recovery rate you'll get.
The good news: finding it doesn't require a consultant. It requires three columns of data.
What you need
Pull a CSV from your ERP or POS with the following columns:
- SKU
- Description
- Quantity on hand
- Unit cost
- Last 12 months of sales (one column with the total, or twelve columns one per month)
That's it. If you have category, supplier, lead time, MOQ — great, we'll use it. But the four required columns get you 80% of the value.
The deadstock rule
A SKU is deadstock if all of these are true:
- You hold inventory of it today (
qty_on_hand > 0). - It hasn't sold in the deadstock window (typically 6 or 12 months, configurable).
- The expected demand for the next forecast horizon is approximately zero.
Critically, this is different from a phantom SKU — a row in your catalog that you never actually stocked (qty on hand is zero, never sold). Those are catalog noise; we filter them out automatically. Deadstock is real cash you spent on inventory that's not moving.
What to do about it
Once you have the list, the action depends on the recovery options:
| Tier | When | Expected recovery | |------|------|-------------------| | Supplier return | Within return window, supplier accepts | 70–95% | | Liquidate | Past return window, healthy market | 25–50% | | Aggressive clearance | Slow market, want it gone | 15–30% | | Write-down | No demand at any price | 0–10% |
The big mistake operators make: they treat all deadstock the same. A $400 SKU you can return to the supplier is worth ~$340. The same SKU written down is worth $0. The plan matters more than the discovery.
The 30-minute version
- Export the CSV (5 min).
- Upload to Tropix Palm at app.tropixoperations.com — Free Diagnostic, no card (1 min).
- Map columns (auto-suggested) (2 min).
- Run the diagnostic (1 min for 10k SKUs).
- Open the action plan, filter to
recommended_action = "Liquidate", sort by inventory value descending. Top 20 rows are your week (15 min). - Send to your buyer with the supplier-return suggestion checkbox where applicable (5 min).
That's the loop. Repeat quarterly, watch your turn ratio improve.
Going further
Once you've cleared the obvious deadstock, the next questions become:
- Why did it become deadstock in the first place? Almost always traces back to a forecast error or an MOQ-forced over-buy. See Why your forecast is wrong and MOQ negotiation tactics.
- How much was carrying that inventory actually costing you? Most operators under-count by 40% — see How to reduce inventory carrying cost for the line items.
- What's a healthy turnover ratio for your industry? Inventory turnover benchmarks by industry (2026).
The full action plan with supplier-return logic, markdown tiers, and per-SKU recovery estimates is in Tropix Palm. See pricing — Starter is $149/month and almost always pays for itself on the first liquidation.