How to track oil shop stock: loose oil, sealed packs and filters

Good oil shop inventory management in Pakistan means tracking three kinds of stock in three different ways: loose oil in litres against each open drum, sealed packs by simple count, and filters by the exact vehicle they fit. Add a supplier name to every purchase and a twenty-minute weekly count, and the stock that quietly disappears from most shops becomes visible.

Ask an owner how many litres of 20W-50 should be left in the drum by the ramp, and most will walk over and knock on the side of it. That knock is the whole problem. This guide replaces it with numbers that do not take your whole evening to keep.

Most of your stock loss happens at the drum

A sealed bottle of Shell Helix or Total Quartz is easy to account for. It is either on the shelf or it was sold. You can count bottles, and your staff know it.

Loose oil is different. Khula tel is poured, not handed over, and the amount poured depends on the jug, the karigar, the customer and how busy the shop is. Ask anyone running a shop where "oil shop ka stock" actually goes missing and they will usually point at the drum before they point at the shelf. It is the one item where nobody can tell, by looking, whether the stock is right.

That is why khula tel ka hisaab deserves more attention than anything else in your inventory. Not because anyone is necessarily stealing, but because the way loose oil is bought and sold makes small losses invisible.

210 litres in, and nobody knows how many came out

Loose oil arrives in bulk. PSO's trade price lists quote automotive grades by the 210-litre drum, and that is the size most shops buy. It leaves the shop a litre or half a litre at a time. On a paper register those two things never meet. The purchase page says "1 drum 20W-50". The sales page says "4 L", "3.5 L", "1 L top-up". Nobody adds the second column up and checks it against the first.

Meanwhile, the drum is losing oil in ways that never reach either page:

• Generous pours. The jug is filled a little past the line for a regular customer, every time.
• Free top-ups. "Thora sa daal do" for someone whose oil looks low, done as a favour and never written down.
• Unbilled pours. A bike comes in, a CD 70 takes well under a litre, the cash goes in the drawer and the bill never gets made.
• Spillage. Every transfer from drum to jug to engine loses something to the floor and the drip tray, more so on a busy afternoon.
• The shop's own use. Oil for the owner's car, the staff bike, the generator. All fair, none recorded.
• The bottom of the drum. The last few litres are hard to pump out, and a drum is often swapped before it is truly empty.

Each is small. Together they add up to real money, and they are invisible if your only record is "1 drum" in and a list of litres out.

The fix starts with one rule: loose oil stock is always kept in litres. You buy one drum, you add 210 litres to stock. You sell 4 litres, you deduct 4. The drum is how it is packed. The litre is how it is counted.

Give every open drum its own card

The simplest tool in this whole guide is a card, a page in a register, or a sheet taped to the wall, one for each open drum. It needs only a few columns:

• Grade and brand, for example ZIC 20W-50 or Shell Helix HX3
• Supplier and purchase bill number
• Date opened, and 210 litres as the starting balance
• Litres billed, deducted from the balance at the end of each day
• Date the drum ran dry

Then use what we call the empty-drum test. When the drum runs dry, look at the card. If the card says 18 litres should still be there and the pump is sucking air, you have lost 18 litres on that drum. You do not need to know yet whether it was spillage, top-ups or bills that never got made. You just need the number, every drum, so you can see whether it is steady, growing, or suddenly worse on a particular shift.

Some loss is normal. Oil sticks to the drum walls, the jug and the funnel. What you are looking for is a loss that changes from drum to drum for no reason. The first time you run this test, expect a number that surprises you.

Two habits make the card far more useful. Write the litres in the shop's own name on any oil used for your own vehicles, so it stops showing up as unexplained loss. And keep a proper measuring jug with clear markings at each bay, so "4 litres" means four litres no matter which karigar is pouring.

Sealed packs are the easy part, mostly

Sealed 1-litre, 3-litre and 4-litre packs behave like normal shop stock. Count them as units, record them by brand, grade and pack size, and they will mostly stay right. A 4-litre Helix HX7 and a 1-litre Helix HX7 are two different items with two different prices, and your register or software should treat them that way.

Where sealed stock goes wrong is at the edges:

• Opened cartons. A carton of twelve gets opened for one bottle and is still counted as a full carton. Count opened cartons as loose bottles, always.
• Loose and sealed of the same grade. If you sell 20W-50 both from a drum and in sealed packs, keep them as separate items. A sealed sale entered as loose, or the other way round, throws both counts off.
• Bottles opened for a top-up. A bottle opened to add half a litre, then sold to the next customer as if it were full. Decide once whether opened bottles move to loose stock, and stick to it.
• Damage and heat. A cracked bottle leaking in the godown is stock lost. Sealed packs stored in a tin-roofed storeroom through a 45°C Lahore summer are also not stock you want to be proud of. Keep them shaded and record breakage as breakage, not as a sale.

Filters are where dead stock collects

Oil filters are small, cheap per piece and easy to over-order. They are also the item most likely to sit on your shelf for a year.

The reason is that a filter only fits certain vehicles. Your shelf probably carries oil filters for the Corolla, Civic, City, Cultus, Alto and Wagon R, plus air filters for the same, plus genuine and non-genuine versions of several. A "Corolla filter" is not one item, because different generations of the same model can take different filters. If your register says "Corolla filter, 6 pcs", it is not telling you whether those six fit the cars actually coming into your shop.

Record filters by part number, with the models each one fits beside it. Then once a month, ask one question: which filters have not sold a single piece in the last 90 days? Those usually fall into three groups:

• Filters for cars that are rare in your area, bought as part of a supplier's package deal
• Filters for an older generation of a car that has mostly left the road near you
• Over-orders of a filter that sells, but nowhere near as fast as you bought it

Dead stock is money standing still. You cannot spend it, and on a paper register you cannot even see it, because the register tells you what sold, never what did not. It is exactly the same problem tyre shops have with sizes nobody drives, and the cure is the same: look for what is not moving, and price it to move or return it to the supplier while you still can.

Your supplier bill is your protection against fake oil

Counterfeit engine oil is a real problem in Pakistan, and the uncomfortable part is how it reaches honest shops. PakWheels has reported that shopkeepers are often unaware the wholesaler is supplying fake oil, and that empty original bottles are refilled and sold again. A "1st copy" carton looks like the real thing on the shelf. The first sign is often a customer complaint.

Your inventory records are your best protection, as long as they record where stock came from and not just how much:

• Buy against a bill, every time. No bill, no entry, no stock. A cash purchase from someone who "had extra" is exactly how fake oil gets onto good shelves.
• Supplier name on every purchase entry. If a customer or a company representative questions a carton, you can show exactly where and when it came from.
• Watch the rate. If one supplier is consistently well below the distributor price on a famous brand, ask why before you buy, not after.
• Destroy empty bottles. Cut or crush original bottles before they leave your shop. If empties are being collected for refilling, do not let yours be part of it.

Supplier-wise records also show, in one place, how much you buy from whom, at what rate, and what you still owe them.

Set reorder levels before the Corolla is on the ramp

Running out is the other side of the stock problem. A customer will usually accept a substitute grade once. The second time, they start wondering about the shop down the road.

A reorder level is the stock figure that tells you to order now. Work it out like this: how much of this item do you sell on a normal day, multiplied by how many days your supplier takes to deliver, plus a few days' extra as a buffer. If you sell about 10 litres of a grade a day and delivery takes three days, you need 30 litres to cover the wait. Add a buffer and you might set the low stock alert at 50 litres. These are example numbers. Use your own sales.

Do not try to set levels for everything at once. Start with the fifteen or twenty items that actually drive your business: your main loose grades, your best-selling sealed packs, and filters for the three or four cars you see most. Then review them twice a year. Demand is not flat. It moves before Eid when families travel, and in the summer when heat and dusty roads bring more cars in.

A stock count you will actually do

The best stock-count routine is the one you still do in month six. Keep it short, keep it on a fixed day, and keep it split in two.

Weekly, about twenty minutes:

• Every open drum: card balance against what is left
• Your ten fastest-selling sealed packs
• Oil filters for your three or four most common cars

Monthly, once, properly:

• Every shelf, every carton and the godown
• The dead-stock question: what has not moved in 90 days
• Total stock value, so you know how much money is sitting in the shop

A few rules that make counts honest:

• Count before the shop opens, not while customers are being served
• Two people: one counts, the other writes
• Never quietly correct the register to match the shelf. Write the difference down first, then correct it
• Look into the biggest rupee differences first, not the biggest piece counts. Ten missing litres of a fully synthetic grade matters more than three missing drain plug washers

What a register can handle, and where software takes over

A stock register is a perfectly good engine oil stock register for a small shop with one counter and an owner who is always there. Everything above can be done on paper. The question is how much of it will actually get done in a busy week.

Lubricant stock management software earns its place in the boring parts. It does the subtraction every time a bill is made, which is the part people stop doing on paper by the third week. In OilShop POS, the inventory and stock control features track every litre and carton by brand and grade, raise low-stock and out-of-stock alerts, record purchases supplier by supplier, and show stock value and dead-stock reports. If you run a dedicated lube centre, the lube shop software page shows how it fits that setup.

One honest limit: software only knows about oil that was billed. It cannot see a pour that never made it onto an invoice. That is why the empty-drum test still matters even after you go digital. The software gives you the expected balance automatically, and the drum tells you the truth.

If you are comparing systems, inventory measured the way you buy it is one of the seven points in our guide to choosing a POS system for an oil change business. And if you are still planning your shop, our breakdown of what it costs to open an oil change shop in Pakistan explains why opening stock usually takes more money than owners plan for.

Where to start this week

Pick the drum you open next, give it a card, and write down every billed litre against it until it runs dry. Then do the empty-drum test. Whatever number you get will tell you more than a month of guessing. After that, add the weekly count, then reorder levels, then the 90-day filter check.

Questions owners ask about oil shop stock