Every pallet in your warehouse has a goods-receipt date. And from that day, a bill starts running: storage fees month after month, tied-up capital, and for some products a ticking shelf-life clock on top. The inventory aging report from byrdAI answers a question that gets asked surprisingly rarely: how long has my stock actually been sitting here?
What makes this question special is that it warns you earlier than any other. A product can still be selling perfectly well and yet quietly build up too much old stock. If you keep an eye on stock age, you catch problems before they show up in the dead stock report or as overstock.
In the dashboard, every unit looks the same.
500 units in stock, all good. That 300 of them have been sitting for over a year while only the last 200 are actually turning over is something no stock figure will ever show you. For that, you need the age view.
Old stock quietly eats your margin.
Goods that sit for 18 months have racked up 18 months of storage costs before earning their first cent of revenue. For low-priced products, storage costs eventually, and unnoticed, overtake the contribution margin.
Quality and shelf life age with it.
Packaging yellows, trends move on, expiry dates creep closer. The older the stock, the smaller your window to still sell it at full price.
How to build an inventory-aging-report with byrdAI
Once you're connected, all it takes in Claude or ChatGPT is:
"Build an inventory aging report, grouped by age bands."
byrdAI analyzes your stock by goods-receipt date and groups it into age bands: 0 to 30 days, 31 to 90, 91 to 180, and older than 180 days. With the ready-made dashboard prompt from the byrdAI page, that turns into a live dashboard showing the age distribution, your oldest stock in detail, and which warehouse your old stock is piling up in.
The 180-day band is your to-do list.
Anything sitting longer than six months needs a decision: actively sell it down, bundle it, or deliberately keep it (with a reason, like seasonal goods). No decision is also a decision, just the most expensive one.
Start with the single oldest item.
The report shows you the oldest lot in the warehouse with its age, unit count, and location. That one item is almost always the best place to start: visible, concrete, and immediately actionable.
Compare warehouse locations.
If old stock is concentrated in one location, the goods may be sitting in the wrong market. Sometimes the fix isn't a discount but a transfer to where the demand actually is.
Double-check shelf-life products.
For batch-tracked goods, put remaining shelf life right next to stock age: the lot tracking report shows whether old stock is also under time pressure.
The monthly age check.
"On the first of each month, send me the age distribution of my stock and the 10 oldest items, with the change versus last month." If the 180-day band is growing, you'll know right away, not at stocktake.
The old-stock trigger.
"Alert me when an item crosses the 180-day mark, with product, unit count, warehouse, and tied-up stock value." Every new case lands on your desk one at a time, while it's still small.
The transfer analysis.
"Show me old stock per warehouse and compare it with the destination countries of my orders over the last 90 days." One question, two byrd data sources, and a solid decision on whether goods should change location.
Stocktake prep. Before the next count
"Create a list of all items over 180 days with location hints for the counting team." Old items are the most common candidates for discrepancies, so this gets them prioritized.
As a byrd customer, you connect byrdAI to Claude or ChatGPT in about 5 minutes and copy the aging prompt (tweaked however you like) from our byrdAI page or below this section. Not a byrd customer yet? byrdAI is only available with byrd fulfillment, as the first European 3PL with an MCP server. Talk to us.
How is stock age calculated?
From the goods-receipt date at the byrd warehouse, per item. The report groups it into the bands 0 to 30, 31 to 90, 91 to 180, and over 180 days; items without a recorded receipt date are shown separately.
What's the difference from the dead stock report?
The dead stock report looks at sales activity (whether a product is selling or not). Inventory aging looks at how long stock has been sitting, even for products that are selling. That's why aging warns you earlier: it finds the problems that aren't problems yet.
Does the report help with storage costs?
Directly. Old stock occupies storage locations you pay for every month. Systematically clearing the 180-day band reduces occupied space and the running costs that come with it, on top of the capital it frees up.
What does byrdAI cost?
During the beta, byrdAI is included in your account free of charge for byrd customers.