Inventory Management Software: Reviewed & Rated
Inventory Management Software
In this site we discuss why your business needs Inventory Management Software, how it can help grow your business and what to look for when getting ready to make your purchase..
No matter how large or small your business is, Inventory Management Software can help make the complex and time consuming tasks more manageable for your business.
If you have been doing things by hand or on a spreadsheet, you might want to think about an upgrade to an inventory management software program especially if you plan on growing your business. When you begin your search for inventory management software there are several things to consider. What hardware will be involved in making the software work? Does it include UPC bar-coding? How much will it cost? You should also consider the fact that you will need to train employees to use it and learn to use the software yourself. All of this can seem daunting, but consider the alternative. Having to do all of your inventory management by hand is time consuming, prone to human error and can eventually get very confused and messy.
So, now that you have decided to get the inventory management software, you need to seek out your options. When you type in inventory management software into a search engine you come up with a ton of results. There are many bells and whistles that come with these programs, but there are a few things that remain the same. First and foremost an inventory management software program needs to provide a scalable database for all of your items. It should allow for information such as, the name of the product, perhaps a picture of the product, how many you have, when it arrived in the store, when it was sold, how much it cost, how much it was sold for, an expiration date if needed, color, size, shape, etc.
The software should also allow you to track your inventory. Sometimes this means that hardware will need to be purchased as well, like bar-code readers. You should be able to track who the item was sold to and the merchant from whence it came. You should also be able to print reports, receipts, invoices and maybe even shipping labels. With the information that your inventory management software provides your accounting should be easier to handle as well.
Also consider the other software you use for your business. Will this new software integrate with (talk to) the other software systems you may be using? For example, will your accounting systems software and your Inventory Management Software be able to link with one another so that you will not have to enter the same data into both systems?
You have plenty of software packages to choose from. Many are simple applications that are part of a financial software. Others get more advanced by adding bar-coding software and special printers for inventory labels, a pricing gun or other scanning device and the ability to record all data associated with the inventory item. The choices only expand from there. Try to stay within your budget, but at the same time, don't skimp on what your business really needs from its inventory management software.
Let's say that you own a small local grocery store. You carry several basic necessities like bread, milk, eggs, butter as well as many shelf stable products. When the shipments start rolling in, you price the items and stick them on the shelves after writing them down on a sheet (hopefully you aren't distracted and miscount). The sheet gets really long and now, a week later, you need to balance the books and take inventory again to see what has sold, what has expired and what you need to restock. Again comes the counting by hand. You would like to expand the number of products that you carry, but find that this process is terribly involved and are hesitant to do so.
Let's say that you own a small local grocery store. You carry several basic necessities like bread, milk, eggs, butter as well as many shelf stable products. When the shipments start rolling in, you price the items and stick them on the shelves after writing them down on a sheet (hopefully you aren't distracted and miscount). The sheet gets really long and now, a week later, you need to balance the books and take inventory again to see what has sold, what has expired and what you need to restock. Again comes the counting by hand. You would like to expand the number of products that you carry, but find that this process is terribly involved and are hesitant to do so.
As you add more products to your stores' inventory, all you need to do is add a few bits of data to the software program and it will do the work for you. You can print a report that tells you how much you have left in stock, warns you if anything is close to expiring so you can put it out for sale (you don't want to have to throw anything away it's just a waste of resources), etc. Your items can be scanned, or a simple code can be entered for each item for easy tracking purposes. All the sales clerk has to do is swipe the item with a scanner, or type in a few digits and the software program will update the inventory list without you having to manually check everything.
Some inventory management software programs even allow for automated reordering. You can set a threshold for when an item runs low and the software program will tell the computer to send an email or process an order with the merchant who supplies the product. You can also find a program that will provide you with analytics allowing you to get a sense of what the current market trends are and how you can profit from those trends. As an example, you might be told that the sale of white bread is up over wheat and adjust your inventory accordingly.
The possibilities are many and varied. Inventory management software can be free, tried for free before you decide to buy it, relatively inexpensive to rather pricy. It depends on where your business is at as to what range of program you get, but as your business grows, so should your inventory management.
Ask yourself these questions: Do I sell more than a dozen items? Do I ship any of these items? Have I ever misplaced an item in inventory? Has anything ever gone missing? If you have answered yes to any of these questions then you need inventory tracking. Whether you track your items by name alone or with a code, perhaps an expiration date, inventory tracking can take care of any problems related to the items you sell.
In today's day and age, the global market is huge and any business that taps into that market needs to know where things are. Most items these days are produced in factories, whether they are tangible or edible. Take Macaroni and Cheese for example. The wheat for the pasta is shipped in from the field to a processing plant where it is ground into flour. That flour is then shipped to a pasta manufacturer who makes the macaroni and then ships that onto the packaging company. The cheese begins with the dairy farmer who sends the milk to a processing plant where cheese is made and the cheese is sent to another processing plant where it is turned into a powder and other ingredients are added and placed in little packets which are then shipped to the packaging company. The cardboard for the box begins with paper pulp from trees; goes to a processing plant that turns it into thin cardboard that is shipped to the printers where the pretty designs are added to the box and the shape is cut out and then that is shipped to the packaging company. With all three things in place, the Mac and Cheese is finally assembled and shipped out to the stores.
To further follow the Mac and Cheese, it is catalogued when it arrives in the store, inventoried, placed on the shelf, scanned at the point of sale, taken home and finally consumed. Whew! Now what happens when any one of these companies has no idea where one of the many ingredients is? Chaos! Production stops, sales are lots, even jobs are potentially lost. No one wants to be the weak link in the chain.
Whether you are selling Mac and Cheese or not, the fact remains that you are selling something and that something needs to be tracked. A good business will know where its inventory is. From where the inventory item was produced, to when it was shipped, to when it arrives at the store and on to when it is sold, the process needs to be tracked and documented or things get lost, misplaced, etc. and then money starts flying out the door and the business may come crashing down.
Inventory tracking can be accomplished in several ways, of which bar-coding is probably the best method. Everything is scanned every step of the way. It is loaded into a database that is accessed by the business owner who then in turn can make adjustments to suppliers who may ship things faster, adjustments to the quantity of items they want to keep in inventory, etc. Not only does bar-coding track the item to the store, but it tracks the item as it is put on the shelf and when it is scanned at the register allowing for you to know what is selling, when to restock it and much more. So, do you need inventory tracking? Yes, you do!
As with any business, your success is monitored by its growth. One of the largest hurdles that a budding business faces is managing its inventory. If you are manufacturing a product, you need to know where your supplies are, if you need to order more and you also need to be able to track the products to their destinations. If you own a retail shop, you need to know what you have in stock and when you need to restock things. If you are constantly telling your customers, "Sorry, we don't have that in stock right now, but if you come back on Tuesday we should have more in," then your business will not grow and in fact may fail.
An inventory management system covers such things as product data, pricing information, sale information, shipping information and other things like asset management. Some of the product data that is registered every step of the way includes the item name, how many you have, if they expire, where they are, if they have been received, how much you paid for them, how much you sold them for, etc. You should receive alerts when you are running low on inventory. The management system may even be set up to place orders with the merchant automatically. When the processes of tracking inventory become more automated, you have more time to work on other aspects of the business. Time after all is money.
When it comes to pricing information, it pays to know how much you paid the merchant for a particular item, add in the shipping and handling costs and adjust the sale price to an average profit margin so that you make more sales and the products don't sit on the shelves forever. Knowing what items are selling and what isn't allows for you to make marketing observations on your own. Shipping information is critical for meeting customer demands and asset management is essential for the growth of your business.
You can also utilize analytical software components in your inventory management system to track trends allowing for you to adjust what you are selling to accommodate the needs of the consumer and make your business more profitable. You can manage customer databases and with their permission send surveys to them to get their input. Inventory management software can help you get all of this information under control and make things run more smoothly for all parties concerned.
With the appropriate inventory management system in place, you can begin to add more items to your list of saleable goods. You can gather information at every interval of an items travel. From tracking where the item originated (or even where the parts for the item came from) to when it arrives at your store to the point of sale, all of this information is catalogued, bagged and tagged to be analyzed in an effort to expand and grow your small business.