Bin Card
A bin card is a quantity-only record kept at the physical storage location itself, written up by the storekeeper as material is received into or issued from that bin. It carries no values. Its purpose is immediate: anybody at the bin can read the balance that should be present, which makes it the record most directly comparable with what is physically standing there.
What Is a Bin Card?
A bin card is deliberately simple. It sits at the storage location, carries quantity only, and is filled in by whoever handles the goods at the instant they move, which makes it the record closest to reality and the one that lines up most tightly against the goods physically present. Somebody standing at the rack can see what ought to be there without opening a system or asking anyone.
Its value depends entirely on being maintained contemporaneously. A card written up at the end of a shift from memory, or from slips that may or may not have survived, is no better than any other retrospective record, and the failure mode is specific: urgent issues made against a verbal instruction, where material leaves and nothing is written anywhere. Where the discipline holds, the card is the fastest way to identify whether a difference arose on the floor or in the accounts office, because it and the stores ledger were written by different people from different sources and only one of them can agree with a count.
What an Auditor Accepts as Evidence of Bin Card
What gives the card its value is contemporaneity, so that is what gets examined.
- Accepted: entries in different hands and different inks accumulated over time, which is what a record written as material moved actually looks like.
- Accepted: agreement with the physical quantity at the position, tested on a sample chosen by value and by movement rather than by convenience.
- Accepted: a divergence from the accounting record that can be explained by a specific document in transit, since that is the ordinary and expected condition.
- Rejected: a card completed in one hand at one sitting, which is a reconstruction whatever the balances say.
- Rejected: a card that agrees perfectly with the accounting record on every line, because two records maintained independently from different sources do not behave that way.
How Bin Card Works in Practice
- A card is opened for each item at each storage position, showing the item, the location and the opening quantity.
- Every time material physically arrives at that position, the storekeeper writes the quantity in and computes the new balance, at the moment it happens rather than afterwards.
- Every time material physically leaves, the same is done in reverse. No exception is allowed, not even for a rush withdrawal authorised by word of mouth, which is exactly the sort that otherwise leaves no trace.
- The card therefore always shows what should be standing in that position, and anybody at the rack can read it without consulting a system or asking a person.
- At a count, the physical quantity is compared with the card and with the accounting record. Since each was compiled by a different person working from a different input, setting them side by side reveals which one is genuinely being kept up.
Bin Card: A Worked Example
| Date | In | Out | Balance shown | Physical | Agrees? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 Sept | 240 | - | 640 | 640 | Yes |
| 13 Sept | - | 180 | 460 | 460 | Yes |
| 17 Sept | - | 120 | 340 | 316 | No, short 24 |
| 19 Sept | 300 | - | 640 | 616 | No, short 24 |
A card hangs on the rack at a Hosur electronics store and is written up by the storekeeper at each movement.
The card carries quantity only, no value, and it sits at the point of movement rather than in an office. That is its strength and its limit. It captures the 17 September shortage on the day it appears, days before a month-end reconciliation would, because the person handling the material records the balance in front of them. But it proves nothing about cost, and it is written by the custodian of the goods, so a card that agrees with the ledger is corroboration rather than independent confirmation. The shortage persisting on 19 September is the useful signal: a one-day discrepancy is usually a timing error, one that carries forward is not.
Common Mistakes With Bin Card
Its whole value rests on being written at the moment of movement.
- Filling it in after the fact, from recollection or from slips that may have gone astray, which strips it of the one advantage it had.
- Exempting urgent issues from the discipline, which is precisely the category where material leaves with nothing written anywhere.
- Allowing anybody to write on it, so entries cannot be attributed and a difference cannot be traced to a person.
- Treating a disagreement with the accounting record as a card error by default, when the card is frequently the more accurate of the two and the physical count is what settles it.
- Abandoning it once a system is installed, which removes the one independent record available for comparison.
Need Help With Bin Card?
Reading about it settles the meaning and nothing else. The moment stores discipline needs testing against an independent count, the position has to be established independently, which is the substance of engineering stock audit. A location list and the current records are enough to scope it.