Van Stock Control for Field Service: The Working System

Van stock control for field service means running each vehicle as its own small warehouse with a fixed parts list, a min and max level for every line, and a top-up that is triggered by the job report rather than by someone's memory on a Monday morning. Four moving parts make it work: a fixed van kit per trade (Swedish firms call it a bilpaket) that every vehicle carries identically; a min/max level per line so a top-up is arithmetic instead of a judgement call; replenishment driven by what was consumed on the job card, so the pick list writes itself overnight; and one registration on the job that becomes both the invoice line and the stock movement, so nothing is counted twice or lost. Get those four right and the unplanned trip to the wholesaler mostly stops happening.

That last part is what pays for the whole exercise. In 2026, supplier lead times and component pricing are still moving enough that the unplanned counter run is the biggest hidden cost sitting inside your day, and it never appears on an invoice because nobody bills it.

Price the problem before you fix it

Do not take a number from a blog. Take your own. Time the next unplanned wholesaler trip your team makes, end to end, from the moment the fitter puts the tool down to the moment work restarts:

• Drive to the counter and back
• Queue and pick
• Reload, re-park, get back into the job
• The customer conversation that starts with "you're back?"

For most urban firms that lands somewhere around an hour. Rural, longer. Now multiply: one trip per van per week, four vans, forty-six working weeks. That is roughly 184 lost hours a year, about a month of one person's productive time, plus the fuel, plus the counter-price uplift you pay for buying one of something instead of a box of them, plus the jobs that slid to next week because the first one overran.

Write that number on a whiteboard. It is the budget for the stock you are about to put in the vans, and it is almost always larger than the stock costs.

Build the van kit: a fixed bilpaket per trade

A van kit is a named, versioned list of parts and quantities that every van of that type carries. Not a suggestion. A list, with a version number, that you can audit in ten minutes with a phone.

The rule for what earns a place on the list is boring and effective: a line goes in if it has been used on more than roughly one job in five over the last six months, or if not having it stops the job dead. The second half of that rule is why an isolator or a shut-off valve stays on the list even though it is rarely used. The first half is why you are not carrying four sizes of something you fitted twice last year.

Pull the data from your last six months of job reports, not from the storeman's opinion. Sort by the number of jobs a line appeared on, not by quantity used. Quantity flatters consumables. Job frequency tells you what stops work.

What a starter kit looks like

Two versions is usually enough: a service van kit and an installation van kit. Resist a third. Every extra variant doubles the audit and halves the discipline.

Then fix the physical layout. Same bin, same shelf, same label, in every van. The point is not tidiness. The point is that a fitter answers "have I got one?" in three seconds without unpacking, and an empty bin is visible from the back doors. A kit that lives in three carrier bags is not a kit.

Min and max: the two numbers that end the guessing

Every line on the kit gets two numbers.

• Min is the trigger. When on-hand drops to it, the line joins the replenishment list. Set it as weekly usage times the realistic time a top-up takes to reach the van, plus a small buffer. Use 10 a week with a one-week top-up and min is 10 plus a buffer of three or four. If a line is on a three-week lead time right now, min is 30-plus. Lead time is the variable that has moved most, and most min levels never got updated to match.
• Max is where the top-up refills to. Set it as min plus a sensible order multiple: the box quantity, the reel, the pack of ten. If your wholesaler sells clips in hundreds, do not make max 37.

Start with round, honest numbers and correct them. If a line never hits min, cut it or lower it. If it hits min every week, raise it. Review quarterly, and review any line the moment your supplier's lead time on it changes. A min level is a statement about your supplier's speed, not about the part.

One caution. Van stock is money parked in a vehicle, and vans get broken into. Do not put slow, expensive, high-theft items in the van because they were annoying once. Those belong in the workshop, on a next-day pull, or ordered per job.

Replenish from the job report, not from a Monday guess

Here is the mechanism that changes everything, and it is simple.

When a fitter registers material on the job card, scanned or picked from your price list with a quantity, that consumption comes off the van's on-hand balance. Overnight, the system compares every van's on-hand against its min. Anything below goes on that van's pick list. In the morning the list is already there: three boxes, one reel, two valves. Picked from the workshop, or sent to the wholesaler as an order for collection.

Compare that with what you probably run today. On Monday someone looks in the vans, or does not look in the vans and asks the fitters, who guess. You order what people happened to remember. You over-order the memorable items and under-order the boring ones, which are exactly the ones that stop jobs.

Two rules keep the mechanism honest:

• Registration happens on site, at the moment of use. Not that evening, not on Friday. This is why an offline-capable field app matters more than it sounds: plant rooms, basements and lift shafts have no signal, and if the app will not record without a bar, the fitter stops recording and your balances rot within a fortnight. The app should queue the entry and replay it when signal returns.
• The workshop replenishes the van. The van never replenishes itself. A fitter buying ad hoc at the counter is a fitter whose balances are permanently wrong and whose material margin is invisible.

Where the count drifts, and how to catch it

Balances will drift. Offcuts, breakages, a part borrowed from another van in a car park, a warranty swap. So spot-count, do not stocktake. Pick five to eight lines a month per van, count them in five minutes, correct the balance, and note which lines drift. If the same line drifts every month, you have a process problem on that line, not a counting problem. A full annual van stocktake is theatre. A monthly five-line count is control.

One registration, two outputs: the invoice line and the stock movement

Most firms get this part wrong, because stock lives in a spreadsheet and invoicing lives somewhere else, so material is typed twice. Type it twice and you get two versions of the truth, and the wrong one is always the stock sheet, because nobody chases it.

Registering material on the job card should produce both outputs from the same entry:

• The invoice line, priced from your supplier price list with your markup applied, so material lands on the invoice at the right price without anyone retyping it.
• The stock movement, decrementing that van's on-hand and feeding tonight's replenishment run.

The side effects are what you actually want. Material stops falling off invoices, which is the quiet leak in most service firms: the fitter used two, remembered one, and the customer paid for one. Material margin per job becomes visible, because purchase price and sale price sit on the same line. And when a supplier price file lands with an uplift across a range, your quotes and invoices move with it instead of lagging a quarter behind.

In Sweden there is a further reason the registration must be clean. On private-home work, the ROT deduction cuts the customer's share of the labour cost by 30%, subject to an annual per-person ceiling shared with RUT; check the current amount at skatteverket.se. Material is not deductible. A material line quietly folded into labour is not just untidy, it is a claim you should not be making. Outside Sweden the shape is the same wherever a scheme, warranty or contract treats parts and labour differently: the split has to be right at the point of registration, because nobody reconstructs it honestly later.

This seam is what OdinTask is built on. Suppliers and price lists sit in the same system as the job card, so registering material on the job produces the invoice line and the stock movement together, and the offline field app records it in a basement with no signal.

Roll it out in two weeks, not two quarters

1. Days 1-2. Export six months of job reports. Rank material lines by how many jobs they appeared on. Draw the line at roughly one in five, then add the job-stoppers by hand.
2. Days 3-4. Write the kit list, version 1.0. Set min and max on every line using your real current lead times. Round numbers are fine.
3. Day 5. Strip one van completely. Everything out. Rebuild it to the kit with labelled bins. Photograph the finished layout. That photo is the standard.
4. Week 2. Rebuild the rest to match. Anything that came out and is not on the list goes back to the workshop, not into a box under the passenger seat.
5. From day one of week 2. Every material use gets registered on the job card. Every one. This is the only habit that matters. The rest is furniture.
6. Week 6. Review. Which lines never hit min? Cut or lower them. Which hit min weekly? Raise them. Publish kit version 1.1.

Five mistakes that kill van stock control

• Letting each van become bespoke. Once vans differ you cannot audit them, you cannot move a fitter into another vehicle, and replenishment becomes per-person folklore.
• Treating the van as free storage. Stock in a van is cash you cannot spend, in a box that can be stolen, exposed to heat and damp. Adhesives, sealants and batteries have shelf lives, and a van is the worst place to test them.
• Registering material at the end of the week. Friday-afternoon recall is fiction. Balances go wrong, the replenishment run orders the wrong things, and within a month everyone declares the system broken.
• Setting min levels once and never touching them. A min level encodes a lead time. When lead times move, every stale min level is a future counter run.
• Running stock separately from invoicing. Two systems mean two entries, and the second one stops happening in about three weeks.

What good looks like after six months

Fitters stop ringing the office to ask whether a part is in the van, because the kit says it is and the bin proves it. The replenishment list is generated, not debated. Unplanned counter runs drop to genuine exceptions: the odd part, the emergency, the wrong survey. Material appears on every invoice because it was registered at the point of use. And you can say, for any job, what the parts cost you and what you sold them for, without opening a spreadsheet.

That is not a warehouse project. It is a list, two numbers per line, and one habit.

If you want the registration, the invoice line and the stock movement to be the same single action, start a free trial and build your van kit against your own price list.