Update: October 19, 2026 A retailer running their books on generic accounting software usually misses one thing: a direct line from the register to the ledger. Sales get entered by hand, inventory costs get estimated instead of tracked, and by the time month-end close happens, nobody’s confident the numbers are actually right. The global retail industry is projected to lose $1.7 trillion in 2026 to overstocks and out-of-stocks together, a cost researchers call inventory distortion. A lot of that traces back to inaccurate inventory and cost data in the first place, numbers that are wrong before anyone even runs a report.
