The Silent Killer

The Silent Killer in Linen Hire: Unaccounted Losses Are Costing Laundries Millions

Every commercial laundry knows it: you can track injections, monitor discards, invest in RFID, and still end up staring at a stocktake that makes no sense.
That gap—the unexplained difference between what should be in circulation and what the stocktake actually finds—is called Unaccounted Loss, and for most hotels and hospitals, it’s far bigger than they realise.

Unaccounted loss is simple in theory:

Opening Inventory
+ New Purchases / Injections
– Known Discards (stained, torn, worn-out, discarded at the laundry)
= Total Book Stock
– Physical Stocktake
= Unaccounted Loss

Below is a real example of a hotel stocktake revealing the scale of the issue.


Item Book Stock Total Stocktake Unaccounted Loss

King Sheets 1656 1529 -127

Pillow Cases 4930 4339 -591

Bath Towels 2190 1957 -233

Hand Towels 3010 2520 -490

Bath Mats 2410 2032 -378

Washcloths 4560 3950 -610

Robes 1159 1150 -9

Total Unaccounted Losses - 2,438

This number represents linen that has vanished. Not discarded. Not sent out damaged. Not returned incorrectly and just gone.

Where does the linen actually go? More is thrown out, misrouted, repurposed, stolen, or lost to clinical waste than operators admit.
This unseen shrinkage destroys rental margins and forces laundries to continuously replace customer losses.

The bottom line is simple: unaccounted loss is real, expensive, and avoidable.
Laundries that measure it, report it, and charge for it stop bleeding margin. Those that don’t continue to subsidise customer waste without even realising it.

Do you want to move to manual counting in and out of all your customers’ linen? If not! RFID tracking is the only answer!