Shrinkage questions indie-retail owners actually search for.

Shrinkage is the gap between what your books say you should have on the shelf and what you can actually count. It comes from four places: shoplifting, employee theft, vendor fraud (under-shipped or swapped items), and plain clerical error — wrong prices, missed receipts, returns logged against the wrong SKU. Most indie shops bleed 1.5–2.5% of revenue to it; the NRF has tracked that band for a decade.

Yes — most of it. Your POS already records sales, receipts, transfers and on-hand counts. Cross-check those four streams against each other and the patterns surface: a SKU that always shows negative on-hand after a transfer, a price override that always lands on the same cashier, a return with no matching sale. No cameras, no RFID, no sensors — just reconciliation of the data you already pay for.

Nightly is the right cadence for the items that move fast and carry margin — the top 10–15% of your SKU list, ranked by dollars, not units. A monthly wall-to-wall count is still worth doing once a year, but the daily reconciliation is what catches the slow drip: one missing scarf here, three over-ringed candles there. Running the agent nightly and walking the shortlist before opening is a ten-minute habit, not a Saturday project.

Just your POS dashboard — Square, Shopify POS, Lightspeed, Clover, QuickBooks POS or Vend. We sign in with a read-only staff account you create, the same screen view your manager would use. We do not need your accounting file, your customer list, or anything from your ecommerce storefront. If you have a separate purchase-order file, we will happily read it too, but it is optional — the audit starts the night after credentials are in.

A full inventory platform — Cin7, TradeGecko, Brightpearl, Zoho Inventory — wants to become your system of record. Nightwren does not. We sit on top of the POS you already use and send you one ranked email before opening. No new dashboard to learn, no double-entry between systems, no implementation week. If you want cycle counts and purchase orders, those tools are great; if you want to know which five items are leaking margin this week, we are the shorter path.