Why this page exists at all
Why a barcode company has its own software.
Fair question, and the answer is thirty-five years old.
Selling somebody a scanner is easy. Watching what happens to the count between the shelf
and the spreadsheet is the part we have had a front-row seat to since 1991 — counts
written on paper and typed up wrong, counts held on a device until the device is dropped,
two people counting the same bay and nobody finding out until the variance report.
So from 2008 to 2024 we ran our own hosted inventory
software — ScanTrack Systems — with a fleet of
more than fifty Windows Mobile scanners out on hire to go with
it. That product did more than this one does. It also ran on hardware that Zebra ended,
on an operating system Microsoft ended, and we were
eight years late moving to Android — which
cost us customers and is written up properly rather than skipped over.
Two businesses still run it today, and we still host it for
them. That, and what it did and did not become, is on
its own page rather than tidied away.
Stocktakes Online is the counting half of that, rebuilt for
Android. The name is not new: it was the stocktaking product inside ScanTrack
Systems from the start, with its own logo, and it was going out on invoices under that
name in 2010. The code is new and the job is the one it always did. It is
narrower than the system it sits in, and that is deliberate.