What is Variance Reporting?
The Variance Reporting report in Ply helps you detect inconsistencies and anomalies in your inventory catalog, things like duplicated materials or items that haven't been assigned to a location. Keeping this report clean ensures your inventory data is accurate and reliable across all locations.
How to Access
Go to the Reports section from the left-hand menu.
Select Variance Reporting.
What Information Does It Show?
Anomalies Analytics - A dashboard at the top that gives you an instant health check of your inventory data, broken down into three severity levels:
🔴 Critical Error: Items with serious data issues that need immediate attention.
🟠 High Priority: Items flagged as anomalies that should be reviewed and resolved soon.
✅ All Good: Items with no detected issues.
A gauge indicator summarizes the overall anomaly level - ideally showing "Looks Good" when issues are minimal.
Anomaly list - Below the analytics, items are listed with their name and error type. The list can be filtered by three tabs:
All: Shows every flagged item across all error types.
Duplicates: Materials that appear more than once in your catalog and may need to be merged or cleaned up.
Without Location: Materials that exist in the system but haven't been assigned to any location, making them invisible to stock tracking.
Available Filters
Search by item name
Sort order
Additional filters (Category, Brand, Manufacturer, Tags)
Export as Excel
Common Use Cases
Identify and merge duplicate materials that may be causing confusion or double-counting in your inventory.
Find materials that were created but never assigned to a location, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Run this report periodically as part of a catalog hygiene routine to keep your inventory data clean.
Use the severity levels to prioritize which issues to fix first.
Tip: Aim to keep your anomaly gauge in the "Looks Good" zone. Even a small number of unresolved duplicates or unassigned materials can skew your other inventory reports.
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