Most AV businesses do not have an inventory problem. They have a clipboard problem. The stock is real. The serial numbers are real. They just live in a half-finished spreadsheet, a notebook in the van, and somebody's head. The day that somebody is on holiday is the day the warranty claim comes in.
Specifi shipped Inventory and Procurement into beta last year and the broad release lands on 1 June 2026, included on every plan at no extra cost. Below is the week-one playbook beta customers have been running. It works if you have five SKUs in a garage or fifteen thousand SKUs across a regional warehouse, a hub van, and three project sites.
1. Model the real world (not an idealised version of it)
Day one is locations. Not "warehouse" as one bucket, but warehouse with zones, aisles and shelves, plus every van that holds its own stock and every project site that is currently holding allocated equipment. The "bulk-create shelving ranges" wizard makes a twelve-aisle warehouse with four shelves per aisle a one-step configuration, not a forty-eight-step data-entry exercise.
2. Get serials in at the point of receipt
If a product carries a serial number, capture it at the moment the receiving line lands. Specifi prompts for it on the receiving screen so you cannot accidentally close the line without one. The lifecycle record (who received it, which van it went to, which job it landed on, what date) builds itself from there.
3. Allocate stock to projects, not to people
Reserved stock on a project record shows up on the project dashboard. Shortages flag as warnings on the dashboard, not in someone's inbox. The £4,200 processor on a job signed for delivery in three weeks shows as "0 in stock, 1 needed, 0 on order, action required" the moment the project record opens.
4. Auto-Optimise the procurement flow
Specifi's Auto-Optimise tool reads the project line items, reserves what is available, drafts pick lists for what is ready and drafts purchase orders for what is missing. One click. Four actions. The output is a procurement plan you can sign off in the morning, not a Tuesday afternoon spent matching one spreadsheet against another.
5. ABC cycle counts replace the all-nighter
Annual stock-takes are the single least pleasant week of an AV ops manager's year. Most teams skip them, then run a fire-drill in February when the accountant asks. Specifi's ABC cycle counts split your inventory into priority bands and rotate the count through the year: high-value plus high-movement items get counted often, the rest get counted on a schedule. You arrive at year-end with the count already done.
6. Make Bob the inventory dashboard you actually use
Ask Bob the live inventory question in plain English. "How many Sonos Amp are in the Manchester warehouse?" "What did we use on the Riverside cinema-room job?" "Which serial number is in the Patel residence rack?" Bob answers from the live ledger, not yesterday's spreadsheet. The clipboard is not coming back.