The advancement of technology has brought us a lot of things and one of those is by way of how businessmen do their business. A lot of online stores have been emerging for the past years, and there are still many more who are starting up to venture this area.
So if you are one of those businessmen who is running online stores, then you know for a fact that managing the inventory is one of the challenging tasks. This is true if you have a lot of product items from different product categories. This might be taking too much warehouse space which leaves you with not having enough space for new items and this might lead to all types of problems for your business.
Because of this, the inventory management software can save you a great big deal from the occurrence of possible problems like that. Furthermore, here are some of the possible scenarios that you can avoid if you make the shift to inventory management software.
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• Risk of losing information
Most start-up companies and small business are using spreadsheets in monitoring their inventories. And if you are one of those who is still using a spreadsheet or something similar of the so in keeping track of your inventory items, then you might just be asking for trouble.
To top the list, the risk of accidentally deleting one or two of your spreadsheet files is very like, and this is just one of the many human errors that might occur. If this happens, this could mean that all the links of formulas that are intertwined from the other spreadsheet files connected to it will be disrupted and this mistake can cost you hundreds of hours to retract the data and thousands of dollars for all incidental costs. When using spreadsheets, this also gives you the difficulty to work on form multiple places at once because you will have to access the file and all of its sub-files in one specific computer. If you want to avoid this type of problem from occurring then you might want to consider shifting yours from manually managing your inventories. Of course, nothing will ever be perfect, but the integration of an inventory management software can come pretty close.
• The occurrence of wasted time
When you are running an online business, chances are there will be a lot of moving parts that are going to be involved. One of those are the price movement and price adjustments, the order number, the packaging and delivery, and the hours start to stack up. By integrating inventory management software, you will be able to automate a lot of these mundane tasks and be able to free up a huge chunk of your time. Time is money and you should be able to use it wisely and not let it go to waste.
• Risk of inaccuracy in inventory records
The task of keeping track of all inventories is indeed a big ordeal for any business owners. Making everything organize can give a huge impact on your business as a whole. So if you’re books are off and the numbers there are skewed then chances are you are losing money one way or another. In fact you might be losing some more because of these kinds of inconsistencies. If you have accurate inventory records, then this will allow you to spend money on what is actually important, and also be able to produce the right business decisions based on the data that you have.
Having a number of selling channels is an essential necessity for online businesses today. This is because the revenue potential is high by gaining reach to more people thereby increasing market share, increasing revenue, and thus giving you a greater opportunity to grow your business.
With such growth, problems can also being to arise and if not you do not have the proper inventory management system and inventory controls at hand, then your stocks might start to spiral out of control. If you have inaccurate records, then you might end up committing to customers because you thought by checking on your records you still have enough quantities to sell, but in reality, you do not. Or, there was a sudden influx of customers but you did not establish the right buffer stock level. All of these can lead to customer dissatisfaction and can give a very huge negative impact on your business. Managing inventories across all of the channels are really very daunting, this is why it is really recommended that this might be a time for you to invest in an inventory management software to prevent all of those possible scenarios to happen.
There are still inherent risks that can occur, especially when it comes to human error, but at least, with this kind of integration, the risk is minimized, and the tracing of errors can no longer be as time-consuming as it was. This is because all of the transactions that affected a certain inventory item can already be access by just a click away. This then enables you to inquire all of the inflows and outflows that happened thereby allowing you to detect what transaction caused the error, and what are the possible solutions for such.
It is also important that the inventory management software that you are going to choose has a good customer service on the other end because there might be some troubleshooting issues that can occur which might not be answered by your in-house I.T. Department and will definitely need the manufacturer’s assistance.
Today, almost all of the inventory management systems are already cloud-based, thus, this makes can now make you access and update your inventory items even though you are out of office or while you are on the go. A decent system will also let you update your inventories via mobile applications so that when you receive an order, you can just then simply barcode it with your app and your system will automatically update your inventory records.
So in any kind of situation, employing the right inventory management software can indeed help your business to succeed. And because you already have some more time in your hands, you can then focus on growing your business furthermore.
