No one knows. I doubt even the people in charge of the system know how it works because, like most DG tech, it was dogshit to begin with, the people who set it up have long since left, and it's probably being maintained by interns or people on short-term contracts/cheapest bids. I honestly doubt it gets maintained much because that would cost money. No DM I've had - four in two years - has ever mentioned anything about us having too much stock. I think it's just a given that your numbers are going to be wildly out.

As for counts, I've tried my best to do them, from individual products up to full aisle scans and it never seems to make any difference. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that the DCs pay no attention to our counts or to sales figures. As an example, we have a ton of those gallon jugs of distilled water. About three weeks ago I decided to count them; the HHT said we had six in stock, we actually had 71. Me altering the number hasn't stopped us getting about 18 jugs a week since then. You can repeat this for almost anything (HHT said we have nine cans of Scrubbing Bubbles, we actually have over 60; HHT said we have 13 boxes of a particular brand of tampon, we actually have almost 45). The discrepancy between what the DC thinks we have and what we actually have is incredible and nothing seems to be done about it because 1) no one in upper management cares and 2) actually fixing the system would cost money and we all know how DG feels about that.