What are the four brick stock stages eBrix tracks?

Raw, carried, kiln and exited—reflecting the physical journey of a brick from moulding through firing to becoming sellable stock.

How is breakage handled in stock reconciliation?

Breakage should be recorded as its own entry at the stage it occurs, rather than left unexplained in the difference between two stage counts.

Does exiting the kiln automatically update sellable stock?

Yes. Exited quantity becomes the sellable stock figure used for both dispatch through challans and for cost-per-brick calculations.

How often should stock be reconciled?

Weekly reconciliation is generally more useful than waiting until season end, since it surfaces a drift while there is still time to investigate its cause.

Brick Stock Reconciliation: Raw, Carried, Kiln, Exited

Ask an owner how many bricks the kiln currently has, and the honest answer is usually "it depends which stage you mean." A brick fresh off the Pathai is not the same as one stacked and carried toward the kiln, which is not the same as one currently firing, which is not the same as one that has exited the kiln and is ready to sort and sell. Each of these is a real, separate count, and reconciliation is the discipline of keeping all of them accurate at the same time.

This is one of the more error-prone numbers at a bhatta, not because the concept is complicated, but because each stage transition is handled by a different set of hands, at a different point in a long working day.

The stages, plainly

Raw: bricks freshly moulded and drying, not yet moved for firing.
Carried: bricks moved from the drying area toward the kiln, staged for loading.
Kiln: bricks currently loaded and firing inside the kiln chamber.
Exited: bricks removed after firing, now sorted and counted as sellable stock (or set aside as breakage).

Where the count actually drifts

Different people count at different handoffs. The person moulding, the person carrying, and the person loading the kiln each report their own number, and small differences between them are rarely investigated in the moment.
Breakage is not always recorded as its own line. When broken bricks are simply left out of the next stage's count without a separate note, it looks like stock disappeared rather than being explained by wastage.
Timing gaps create phantom stock. If carrying to the kiln is recorded a day after it happened, the same bricks can briefly appear as both "raw" and "carried" in different books.
Kiln exit is often recorded in bulk rather than as it happens, so the exited count for a specific day can be an estimate rather than an actual tally.

What accurate reconciliation actually requires

A count taken at the moment of each transition—raw to carried, carried to kiln, kiln to exited—rather than reconstructed afterward from memory.
Breakage and wastage recorded as their own entry at the stage they occur, not silently subtracted from the next count.
One person accountable for the count at each checkpoint, so a discrepancy has an obvious first place to check.
A running balance calculated from these entries, not re-added by hand each time someone wants to know the current position.

How this is connected in eBrix

eBrix tracks brick stock through these same stages—raw, carried, kiln and exited—as connected entries rather than separate books. Moving a quantity from one stage to the next is its own recorded transaction, so the running balance at each stage reflects actual movement, and breakage can be entered at the stage it happens rather than absorbed silently into the next count.

Because exited stock is what becomes sellable stock, this connects directly into the challan process described in an earlier post: a dispatch reduces sellable stock from the same figure that reconciliation is tracking, rather than from a separately maintained sales estimate. It also feeds cost-per-brick calculations, since sellable count—not raw fired count—is what an accurate cost figure should be divided by.

Being honest about the trade-off

Software cannot correct a count that was never taken accurately at the physical handoff. If carrying to the kiln is estimated rather than counted, or breakage is guessed at rather than tallied, the recorded stage balance will be exactly as unreliable as it would be in a register—just presented with more apparent precision.

The improvement comes from having one connected place for the numbers once they are captured correctly, not from removing the need to capture them correctly in the first place.

A practical reconciliation habit

Count at the moment of each stage transition, not at the end of the day from memory.
Record breakage the same day it is identified, tagged to the stage it occurred at.
Reconcile stage balances weekly, not only at season end, so a drift is caught while it is still small.
Periodically cross-check exited stock against actual dispatches to confirm the sellable count and the sales record still agree.

Brick Stock Reconciliation: Where Raw, Carried, Kiln and Exited Counts Actually Drift