There is one major commonality across all industries - inventory. How much inventory do you have? What products are big sellers? What products are lingering on the shelves? How do you track all this data in an efficient manner?
Accurate Inventory Counts
Whatever your business, keeping accurate counts of your inventory is essential to its health and well-being. If you do not have a real-time accurate inventory count at all times you will find that you are unable to answer the above questions. Leaving those questions unanswered will eventually lead to profit loss.
The Pareto Principle
There is a well-known Pareto Principle that states that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your products. The other 80% of your inventory will just cost money. With this in mind, you can see the importance of having a handle on your inventory levels. In the same way that out of stock items will cause you to lose customers and therefore earnings, inventory that wallows on the shelves will also cause you to lose revenue. Not only are you unable to earn money on the items not sold, you are also unable to purchase more of what will sell because the unsold inventory is taking up valuable warehouse space.
"Just Enough" Inventory
In order for your business to thrive and grow, you need to ensure that you always have what the customer wants when the customer wants it. But, there is a fine line between having enough and having too much. Just like you don’t want to understock, you also don’t want to overstock. It may surprise you to learn that 83% of retailers/manufacturers/distributors considered overstocks one of the major pain points of their business. It is imperative to always have just enough.
Transparency of Inventory Quantity
Another benefit of having accurate inventory counts can be seen in a recent UPS study. They found that 58% of online shoppers said they were more likely to purchase an item if they were able to see the quantity available before making the purchase. Having an accurate accounting of inventory will allow you to pass that information on to potential customers. And as you can see, that will boost sales. Boosted sales = increased profitability.
Employee Theft
Lastly, as much as you would like to consider your company immune, employee theft is another reason to make sure you have an accurate inventory count. Without an exact record, it is very easy for an unsavory employee to slip out with some of your inventory without your knowledge. With an accurate tally of your inventory, you will know that theft is occurring if inventory levels are shrinking but profits are not increasing.
Maintaining Accurate Inventory Counts is Not Impossible
Now comes the hard part. You can clearly see the importance of accurately tracking inventory levels. But, won’t this take up endless hours of your time? How can you do this without it becoming an enormous, repetitive, boring task? If you are using the old fashioned pen and paper method, or even Excel spreadsheets, keeping an accurate record of your inventory will indeed be a monumental task. However, with the correct inventory management software in place, tracking inventory will just become one of the routine tasks that you do each day without even thinking about it.
SkuNexus is just the software you need. We are an all encompassing, fully customizable, inventory/order/warehouse management platform. Not only are we able to help you easily track your inventory, our software can also be customized to suit your needs. We exist to make your life easier. With tracking inventory off your list of long monotonous tasks, you will be able to devote more time to making your business even more profitable than it already is!
Click here to see how SkuNexus can help you track your inventory!
