Restocking your machines

Restocking is where the business is either profitable or not. The machine is the easy part.

Know what to bring before you leave

The whole point of a connected machine is that you never drive to a site to find out what it needs. Pull the stock levels before you load the van, and take what the machines actually want plus a small buffer — not one of everything.

Restocking at the machine

Open the machine and put it into the restocking or service mode so sales do not land mid-count.
Work tray by tray, front to back, so you do not lose your place.
Fill each lane to its real capacity — one item per coil turn, nothing forced in at the front.
Enter the new counts as you go rather than from memory afterwards.
Before you close up, look along each lane from the side for anything leaning or double-loaded.
Close the door, exit service mode and confirm the machine is back online and showing the new counts.

Restocking from your phone

Updating counts from your phone at the machine is usually faster than the on-screen keypad, and it means you are looking at the same numbers you will see later in reports. Whichever you use, use one of them consistently — mixing both is how counts drift.

Keeping counts honest

Inventory accuracy decays unless you maintain it. Every misdrop, every free vend, every item a member of staff helps themselves to pulls the platform's number away from reality.

Do a full physical count against the platform on a fixed schedule — monthly is enough for most routes.
Investigate any lane that is repeatedly short. A lane that loses one or two a week is usually misdropping, not being stolen.
Record free vends and refunds rather than adjusting counts quietly, so the numbers still explain themselves later.
Reset counts to reality after any jam clearance, since a jam almost always means the count is wrong.

Planning the route

Group by geography, not by machine. Two stops on the same street on different days is money on the floor.
Let the low-stock alerts set the priority, but batch nearby machines into the same run even if one is only half empty.
Track how long each stop actually takes. The difference between a fifteen-minute stop and a forty-minute one across a route is the difference between a good week and a wasted one.
Watch for the machine that always needs the same thing. That is usually a pricing or capacity signal, not a restocking one.