Many businesses start out with basic financial management software, or bookkeeping software consisting of general ledger accounts payable and accounts receivable.
As the business grows, managing inventory becomes essential to the profitability of the business.
Three software modules work together to provide excellent inventory management:
Inventory, order entry, and purchase orders.
What are the signs your business is ready to start looking at an inventory management system?
You sometimes forget to ship back ordered items.
Without a system to track items on backorder, it can be easy to forget to ship those back ordered items.
An order entry system allows you to ship the items that are available, and keep track of those unshipped items, so you won’t forget to ship them once available.
You are unsure about when to re-order, and how many of each item to keep in stock.
With an inventory system, you can run reports that show demand for each item within the time period you choose, so you’ll know when you are running low, and have a gauge for how many to keep in stock.
For example, in the busy sales months you can maintain inventory levels for your customers, but in the slower sales cycle, you won’t have a shelf full of obsolete items.
You are unsure which items you sell are the most and least profitable.
One item seems to be flying off the shelf, while another has minimal sales revenue.
Not knowing of which of those two items is more profitable is a huge mistake.
If the slow seller is more profitable, a smart idea would be to focus on increasing sales to improve overall profitability.
When a customer places an order, you cannot tell whether those items are in stock.
If you constantly have to walk back to the warehouse or call somebody to physically check on the stock status of an item, you are doing your customer and yourself a disservice.
Checking stock manually wastes your employees’ time.
It can also result in broken promises or delayed shipping to your customer.
Adding a computerized system for checking inventory can greatly enhance your customer satisfaction, and can improve the efficiency of your business.
You have different pricing levels for your products which are currently accessed from a paper file.
If you are keeping pricing information on paper, it can be hard to tell which pricing is the most current, and sometimes the correct sheet can even disappear.
Having your software keep track of multiple pricing levels is a much more secure and organized way to keep track of pricing.
By assigning each customer their respective price level, your orders will automatically show correct pricing when the order is entered into the system.
Contact us for an efficient Inventory management system.