How Much Dead Stock and Supply Runs Are Really Costing You

Poor stock control rarely shows up as a single line on a P&L. It hides as supply runs, half-empty vans, capital tied up in parts you'll never fit, and jobs that drag into a second visit because the right part wasn't on board. Add it up across a year and it is one of the biggest leaks in a field service business.

The hidden cost today

• Emergency merchant runs — every detour costs roughly 30–45 minutes of paid labour and the slot it pushes back.
• Dead van stock — parts that haven't moved in 12 months still cost you the cash you paid for them.
• Stock-outs — the engineer is on site, can't finish, and you book a return visit you can't bill in full.
• Admin time — counting vans, raising orders, reconciling receipts, chasing missing parts.

What Tryoup changes

Tryoup's stock control tracks parts at the van and warehouse level, links every issued part to a job, and flags low stock automatically. Combined with our Bilddit integration, engineers can order what they're missing from inside the job and have it sent straight to the customer's address — no merchant detour.

A worked example

Take a typical 6-engineer firm. Conservative, illustrative numbers:

• 6 engineers × 1 supply run per day × 40 minutes lost = 4 engineer-hours per day.
• At a fully-loaded cost of £45/hour, that's £180/day, or £900/week.
• Add fuel and the slot you couldn't book: realistically another £700/week.
• Annualised: ~£83,000/year back in the business.

On top of that, a typical clean-up of dead van stock recovers 10–20% of inventory value. For a firm carrying £30,000 across the vans, that's another £3,000–£6,000 of working capital freed up.

A simple formula

Annual saving ≈ engineers × supply runs/day × 40 min × £45/hr × 230 working days

Plug your own team size and habits into that and the answer is almost always five figures.