There's a number many merchants have never seen, and it still has a say in their liquidity: the value of the goods sitting in the warehouse beyond actual demand. A byrd customer saw that number for the first time recently. It was €442,000. Found with a single prompt, in under a minute.
Excess inventory, or surplus stock, is a different thing from dead stock. Dead stock doesn't sell. Overstock inventory often affects products that sell perfectly well but were simply bought in too large a quantity: three years of supply for a product that's ordered twice a week. The goods are fine; the quantity is the problem.
Large orders look sensible.
Better unit prices, ordering less often, no more fear of a stockout. What the math leaves out: storage costs over months or years, tied-up capital, and the risk that demand shifts before the supply is gone.
Almost no one knows their cover per SKU.
As a rule of thumb, depending on the product and the industry, three to at most six months of cover counts as healthy. In practice, nearly every assortment has SKUs with two, five, or in extreme cases twenty years of supply. No one decided that; it just happened.
No one sees the total.
On its own, each case looks small. Only the total across all SKUs shows how much liquidity is really sitting on the shelf.
How to find your excess inventory with byrdAI
Einmal verbunden, reicht in Claude oder ChatGPT z.B. die Frage:
"Where am I overstocked, and how much capital is tied up in it?"
byrdAI compares each SKU's current stock with its actual sales velocity and shows you what goes beyond a healthy level of cover, in units and in euros at cost. With the ready-made dashboard prompt from the byrdAI page, that turns into a live dashboard with three severity levels:
Stop reordering.
The fastest win costs nothing: for every SKU at 12 months of cover or more, you simply stop ordering until the cover is healthy again. The reorder planner factors this in automatically.
Sell it down with a plan.
For the 4-to-12-month zone, the usual levers are enough: promotional pricing, bundles, marketplace deals. The goal isn't maximum margin per unit; it's reclaiming capital and space that earn more elsewhere.
Assess the extreme cases honestly.
At three years of cover or more, the question is no longer "How do I sell this?" but "What does keeping it cost me?" Liquidating, donating, or writing it off is often cheaper than more years of storage rent.
Adjust your purchasing.
The most lasting effect happens before the next order: smaller quantities, ordered more often. If your supplier's minimum order quantities are forcing you into overstock, the report is your argument for the next MOQ negotiation.
The monthly purchasing review
"Send me excess inventory by severity, with the 10 biggest capital drains and the change versus last month." The change is the metric that matters: it shows whether your actions are working.
The purchasing guard
"Warn me before I reorder a product that still has more than 12 months of cover." The cheapest overstock is the kind that never happens.
The sell-down pipeline.
"From all SKUs with 1 to 3 years of cover, build a sell-down list with remaining stock, goods value, and a suggested discount, as a table for my marketing team." The analysis becomes a ready-made basis for a campaign.
Combined with ABC analysis.
"Show me excess inventory for B and C items only." For an A item, a buffer can be strategic. For a C item, it's just expensive. The ABC analysis provides the classes for it.
Maybe it isn't €442,000 for you. Maybe it's €30,000, maybe more. The point is: after a minute, you'll know. As a byrd customer, you connect byrdAI to Claude or ChatGPT in about 5 minutes and copy the overstock prompt 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.
When does stock count as excess inventory?
By default, the report starts at 120 days of cover, so anything beyond roughly four months of supply at the current sell-through rate. You adjust the threshold to your business with a prompt.
What's the difference from the dead stock report?
Dead stock barely sells or never sells, a demand problem. Overstock usually affects products with healthy demand but too large a supply, a purchasing problem. Together, the two reports give you the complete picture of your tied-up capital.
How is the excess inventory value calculated?
From the cost prices you maintain in byrd, for the units above a healthy level of cover. If cost prices are missing, the value is a floor.
What does byrdAI cost?
During the beta, byrdAI is included in your account free of charge for byrd customers.