After Stocky: Who Tracks What Your Stock Cost?

Shopify has retired Stocky, and the replacement lists are everywhere. Read a few and you will notice they compare the same things: forecasting accuracy, reorder suggestions, purchase order workflows. All real, all worth comparing.

Almost none of them mention the job that turns into a problem at the next month end: for thousands of stores, Stocky was the only system recording what inventory actually cost. Not what to reorder. What the units you already sold cost you, which is the number behind your gross margin, your inventory value and the COGS line your accountant posts.

It is worth naming what Stocky was really doing there, because it changes what you are shopping for. Stocky came free with POS Pro, and for a lot of stores it was the only thing standing between them and a cost spreadsheet. Take it away and the spreadsheet is what is left. It was always the spreadsheet. Stocky just hid it.

This guide is the missing half of the comparison. It covers what went with the app, which class of replacement actually picks up the cost side, and how to rebuild a cost baseline now that the history has gone. For the forecasting half, the roundups already out there do a good job, and we point you to the best of them below rather than repeating it.

First: What Actually Went When Stocky Went

Stocky was a Shopify app, and the data inside it belonged to the app, not to your store. So the useful question was never when it went. It is which of your numbers only ever lived in there, because those are the ones that went with it.

The loss is uneven, and the cost data is on the wrong side of it. Your core store data is safe, because it never lived in Stocky. The cost history mostly did:

Stocky Was Five Apps in One. Alternatives Replace Four of Them.

Stocky shipped free with POS Pro, so it was built broad and shallow: a purchase order tool, a demand forecaster, a stocktake tool, a transfer manager and a cost reporting layer wearing one interface. The replacements have each picked a lane:

The forecasting lane is genuinely crowded with good options, and it is the lane most roundups rank. StockTrim's Stocky alternatives roundup is the most thorough comparison of that side we have read, covering the planning tools from SMB-priced through to mid-market. If reordering decisions are your main Stocky loss, start there.

If the cost side is your loss, read on, because the forecasting roundups (understandably) do not cover it at all.

What Stocky's Cost Side Actually Did

Three quiet jobs, invisible until they stop happening:

• It kept cost history per receipt. Every PO recorded what you paid for that batch, at that time, from that supplier. Shopify's own cost per item field holds exactly one current number; update it and the old cost is gone. History is what makes a real COGS calculation possible, and when Stocky went, its copy of that history went with it.
• It valued your inventory. Stock on hand times cost is the inventory asset figure on your balance sheet, and the starting point for any conversation with a lender, a buyer or your accountant.
• It costed your stocktake variances. A stocktake that finds 12 missing units is an inventory write-down in dollars, not just a quantity fix. Stocky connected the count to the cost.

Here is the timing trap, and it is why this is quieter than it should be. Losing the app was a single day, and plenty of stores barely noticed it. The cost of losing it arrives at the next close, when the accounts (and, for Australian stores, the BAS) need a COGS number and the system that used to produce one is not there. The merchants who handle it well treat it as two separate tasks: find whatever export you took, and stand up whatever replaces the cost tracking before the next period starts, so there is no gap in the record from here on.

How Each Class of Alternative Handles Costing

Shopify's Built-In Tools: one field, no history

Shopify admin keeps products, per-location stock levels and the single cost per item field that feeds its profit reports. For a store that never opened Stocky's reports, that may be enough, and it is free.

But a single current number cannot do cost accounting. When your supplier raises prices and you update the field, every report reprices your entire history at today's cost. No per-receipt layers, no FIFO, no inventory valuation your accountant would sign off on. We cover why Shopify cannot produce a real COGS number on its own in detail; the short version is that COGS needs a history and Shopify stores a snapshot.

Forecasting & PO Apps: excellent at their lane, and costing is not it

This is the biggest cluster of Stocky replacements, and the quality is high:

• StockTrim has done AI demand forecasting for small and mid-sized businesses since 2017: seasonality, per-location planning, supplier lead times, and bill-of-materials forecasting for businesses that manufacture or assemble, which almost nothing else at SMB pricing does. Like Landara, it works alongside Shopify rather than replacing it, so adopting it is a connection, not a migration.
• Prediko is Shopify-native and covers the widest slice of Stocky's daily operations: demand planning plus a proper raise-send-track-receive purchase order workflow.
• Inventory Planner (part of the Sage/Brightpearl family) is the heavyweight planning option for larger retailers with a buying function.
• Fabrikatör is a Shopify-embedded operations app centred on POs and replenishment, with workflow extras like turning incoming stock into backorders.

On costing, all of them stop at the same line, and it is worth being fair about why: it is a different job. Forecasting answers what should I buy? COGS answers what did the units I sold cost?, which needs per-receipt cost layers, an accounting method applied to every sale, and a journal at the end. None of these apps track cost layers, allocate landed costs or produce accounting output, and none of them claims to. If you pick one, and for reordering pain you should, the cost side still needs an answer.

A Full IMS: real costing, at the cost of a migration

Full inventory systems do proper perpetual costing. Cin7 covers multi-channel retail, warehousing and B2B; Katana is the manufacturing-first option. Both replace every Stocky job at once, cost tracking included.

The trade-off is structural: an IMS takes over inventory. Shopify stops being the source of truth for stock; the IMS is. That means a migration project measured in weeks, retraining, monthly pricing that starts in the hundreds, and a system your team must keep feeding forever. If you need warehousing, B2B or manufacturing anyway, that price buys a lot. Buying an IMS only to get a COGS number back is the overcorrection we see most often in Stocky migration threads.

A Cost Ledger Beside Shopify: purpose-built for the orphan job

The fourth option keeps Shopify in charge of stock and adds only the missing layer: a ledger that records what every unit cost. This is the lane Landara is built for, and since it is our product, weigh this section accordingly.

Landara replaces Stocky's cost side like this:

1. Every receipt becomes a dated cost layer at the price you actually paid. Any PO CSVs you exported from Stocky can be imported as historical layers, so that cost history outlives the app that made it. If you have none, the baseline below covers you instead.
2. Every Shopify order is costed as it ships, oldest layer first (FIFO) or by moving average, with an audit trail from each sale back to its source documents.
3. Stocktakes are back, with barcode scanning, and the variance posts as a costed adjustment: shrinkage valued FIFO, found stock added at cost.
4. Importers get landed cost. Upload the freight and duty invoices behind a shipment and the import costs fold into each unit's layer, so margins reflect what stock truly cost, not just the supplier invoice. Stocky never did this.
5. Month end produces the journal: a ready-to-post Dr COGS / Cr Inventory entry for Xero or QuickBooks. You review and post it yourself; nothing is written to your books unasked.

Where Landara falls short: it deliberately does not forecast demand, suggest reorder quantities or send POs to suppliers, and it is not an inventory system. If replenishment planning was your main Stocky use, you want a forecasting app from the section above, either instead of or alongside Landara. There is a free tier, so you can see your real numbers before paying anything.

The Cost-Side Comparison Nobody Publishes

If the question underneath your shortlist is really what will my accountant get at month end?, that is a narrower and more useful test than any feature list. We graded five Shopify tools on exactly that: what each one hands over at close, a journal to post or a number to rebuild.

What Only a Cost Ledger Does

The table above shows which category covers the cost side at all. This is the finer question, and it is the one that decides whether the number you produce survives contact with your accountant. Eight differences, each of which a forecasting app, a purchase order app or a spreadsheet gets wrong by design rather than by oversight:

• Every receipt of stock arrives at a different price, and your store keeps one. Shopify holds a single cost per variant and overwrites it whenever it changes, so last month's cost is simply gone. A cost ledger keeps a dated cost for every receipt instead, which is what FIFO actually needs and what makes the figure auditable months later. This is the difference a spreadsheet cannot close: one cell per product, however many prices you really paid.
• A journal your accountant posts, not a number you retype. A Dr COGS / Cr Inventory journal ready for Xero or QuickBooks, alongside revaluation, write-down and shrinkage journals. You review it and you post it. Landara never writes to your ledger unasked.
• Landed cost inside the layer, not on a spreadsheet beside it. Freight, duty, insurance and clearance are allocated across the units on the shipment, so the layer that depletes on a sale already carries what it truly cost to land those goods.
• Recoverable import tax stays recoverable, never capitalised. Import GST and VAT are reclaimable, so they must never inflate inventory value, while customs duty correctly does. Treating every border charge alike overstates landed cost and leaves the tax off your BAS. This is the single most common way a hand-built landed cost sheet is wrong.
• Two costing bases, not one opinion. Cost at sale and cost at fulfilment, switchable whenever you need. They are two views of the same COGS and are never summed, so you can match whichever basis your accountant works from.
• A ledger with no delete button, not an editable history. A correction is a reversing movement, never a deletion, so the audit trail behind a period you have already posted stays intact. That is the difference between a record and a working file.
• Shopify keeps owning quantity, so there is no migration. A cost ledger never maintains a competing stock-on-hand number and never asks you to move inventory into another system. It costs the movements Shopify already reports.
• Built for the cost side only, and honest about it. Landara does not forecast demand or run your reorder workflow, and will tell you so. It does the one job with an accounting deadline behind it, which is exactly why it sits beside whatever you choose for planning.

The Two-App Answer

For most ex-Stocky stores the strongest setup is two focused tools, not one broad one. Every non-IMS option here leaves Shopify as the source of truth for stock, so they read the same data and never fight over it. Split the replacement along the two questions Stocky used to answer:

• "What did it cost me?" goes to a cost ledger. Landara tracks the landed cost of every unit, runs the stocktakes, and hands your bookkeeper the monthly COGS journal.
• "What should I buy?" goes to a forecasting tool. StockTrim if you want the deepest forecasting for the money (or you manufacture); Prediko or Fabrikatör if you want PO workflows attached.

Two focused subscriptions typically still land well under a full IMS, with no migration project and no new system for your team to live in. Because each connects to Shopify independently, you can adopt them one at a time.

If you can only do one first, do the cost side. A gap in forecasting costs you a reorder, and you can place that order by hand. A gap in costing costs you the books, and the history that would let you fix it later went with Stocky. Forecasting can be added calmly whenever you get to it. Every month you sell without a cost ledger is another month that cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

If the History Is Already Gone

Never took the export, or found this article after the app went? The per-receipt history is gone, and nothing brings it back. But a cost baseline can still be rebuilt from what Shopify kept: your current stock levels and the cost per item field. Landara syncs both as an opening position, so cost layers, COGS and the monthly journal run correctly from today forward, and takes about 20 minutes. You lose the ability to audit history that predates the baseline; you do not lose the ability to have correct books from here on. Do it before the period you care about starts, and that period's COGS is a report, not an archaeology project.

Frequently Asked Questions

The deadline everyone was watching has passed, and the one that actually bills you has not moved. It is your own accounting calendar. Every receipt of stock arrives at a different price, your store keeps one number per product, and the gap between those two facts is the COGS line somebody has to sign. Pick the lane that closes it, then add the forecasting when you have the room.