Cycle counts are a critical part of keeping warehouse inventory accurate without performing a full physical inventory. The Cycle Count Automation feature in 3PL Warehouse Manager allows you to automate the creation of item-based audit jobs based on how frequently items need to be counted. This saves time, reduces errors, and ensures your inventory stays accurate without manual scheduling.

This guide explains how to enable and manage cycle count automation in 3PL Warehouse Manager. For more information about best practices and FAQs about this feature, read this help article. (link)

What is automated cycle counting?

Once enabled, cycle count automation automatically creates audit jobs for items that are due to be counted. The frequency of these counts is set per item by your customer or administrator. These audit jobs are generated once each day, early in the morning, based on each warehouse’s specified time zone, and appear in your Audit Inventory job grid just like manually created jobs.

Enabling cycle count automation

Cycle count automation is enabled for each customer individually. You can turn this feature on and define how audit jobs should be created by default in the customer settings. Once saved, the system evaluates items daily and creates audit jobs as needed based on each item’s count frequency. To enable cycle count automation for a customer:

1. Go to Customers > Manage Customers. 
2. Select the customer you want to edit from the grid and click Edit. 
3. Open the Inventory tab to see the cycle count settings.
4. Check Automate Item-based Cycle Count to enable cycle counting.
5. Configure the default job settings. The system uses these settings to configure the automated audit jobs it creates:
   • Job Priority: Select priority for this job with 1 being the highest and 10 the lowest priority. By default, jobs are set with a priority of 8.
   • Collect MU and Track-bys: Audit jobs created by cycle counts will collect MU and Track-bys. This setting is enabled by default and is recommended to accurately reconcile audit results.
   • Include Suggested Locations: Specifies if you want the job to include “suggested locations”, which are locations where the item has been stored in the past. When enabled, specify how far in the past to look, in days. 
   • Set the default job assignee
   • Assigned To: Choose a user from the warehouse to assign the audit jobs to.
     Note: If the customer has inventory in multiple warehouses, you can specify a different default assignee for each warehouse.

Setting cycle count frequency

The frequency of how often the system schedules audit jobs is handled by item. 3PL Warehouse Manager uses the Days Between Counts item field to decide when to create audit jobs. 

1. Go to Items > Manage Items.
2. Select the customer you’re creating audit jobs for from the Customer dropdown menu.
3. Select the item you want from the Items grid and click Edit. 
4. In the Items tab, go to Inventory Options > Days Between Counts and enter the number of days you want the audit job to be created. 
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each item. 

Managing the daily audit job limit

To prevent too many audit jobs from being created on a given day, each warehouse can have a maximum daily limit, which includes jobs across all customers and items. This setting ensures a manageable workload for counting staff.

Note: Consider how you use this setting carefully. Setting the daily maximum too low can result in the count for a given item being delayed, and possibly violating SLA requirements that you might have with your customers.

1. To set the daily limit:
2. Go to Warehouse > Manage Warehouse
3.  Select a warehouse from the grid and click Edit.
4. Open the Customizations tab.
5. In the Maximum number of audit jobs per day field, enter the total number of audit jobs you want the WMS to create each day for that warehouse.