When You Wonder If It’s Worth the Effort

Tell me, does this ever happen to you?
You walk into your stockroom, look around, and walk right back out again? You close the door (and your eyes), take a deep breath, and cross that threshold again because it’s that time?
Time to take inventory. Cue ominous music.
Do you walk in with a clipboard in one hand and aspirin in the other? Do your eyes cross after row upon row of tally marks? Can you count the hours wasted on an Excel spreadsheet that your gut tells you doesn’t match the shelves?
Don’t worry, you aren’t alone: 43 percent of small businesses still use some form of manual tallying to keep track of their inventory, including spreadsheets and checklists, and that’s if they bother to keep it at all! You would think the fact that administrative and paperwork errors caused 16 percent of retail shrinkage in 2016 would be a good reason to level up inventory skills!
If you find yourself in this percentile, here are a few things to think about that might help nudge you toward a more efficient way to handle your stock.
Excel Can’t Handle the Workload
What can be said about spreadsheets and their inability to keep up with modern demands? Or the money misspent thanks to excessive orders or miscounted supplies? And the long, tedious, wasted hours spent behind a keyboard in the endless input of numbers from varied tallies from who knows when? Hours, by the way, spent by a single person at any given time because you cannot give more than one person access to that book at once. Can you think of better ways to spend four hours a week?
Now, if your business only deals with a limited amount of goods, a spreadsheet may well still work for you. The same goes if you don’t need your counts updated quickly or somehow happen to have extra time to spare. If that’s not the case, or if you can think of better ways to use that time (and money), then check into an inventory management system. You can quickly assign an ID for each item, create and update a database in real time, and avoid the spreadsheet daze! Chances are you’ll save money you never even knew you spent.
You Won’t Hurt For Options
So what exactly does your business need to get your inventory under control? Does your team find it almost impossible to locate something in your storeroom because it doubles as the Bermuda Triangle? Do the lines of your spreadsheets slowly drift together to form a boldface HA!? Maybe you just want to keep those costs down or help your employees hone their inventory skills.
Whatever the reason, you can find an IMS that fits your needs, your budget, and your future. You’ll need to stay mindful of your current standings. Can you really afford the glitzy, top-of-the-line version with more features than you need? How much time will your people need to learn the system and how quickly can you get it done? Will this system still work for you down the road of will you need to make a (costly) upgrade before you know it?
Your (In)action Helps Increase Your Shrinkage
Administrative foul-ups placed third in the top five causes of retail shrinkage for 2015. And one of the chief components of said foul-ups?
You got it: Inventory! Point-and-count methodology, guesstimation, out-of-date means, or to not even bother with it, the end result remains the same: It costs your business money.
If you integrate a retail accounting approach to your inventory management system – you know, the one you decided to invest in to help ease your burdens? – you’ll gain more than just gain a real-time look at your storage space. You get the ability to see into the future – in a sense.
You can note and monitor any fluctuations in the value of your stock, which would provide you with up-to-date counts and costs at a single glance. Given enough data, you can make predictions on when to increase or decrease your orders based on past trends.
No One Likes A Bad Surprise
You never want to tell a customer, “Yeah, we have one of those in the back,” only to come out empty handed. Suddenly your script reads, “Well, I thought we had that,” or, “The computer said we had one.”
This translates into,” I had no clue if we had one or not.” At best, that leaves you with a delayed sale. Slide a little farther along that scale and you lose the sale. Go a little more and you lose a customer. You can see how this progresses, but I’ll spoil it just the same: Too many lost customers and you shutter your doors.
With constantly updated inventory, you can answer your customers with certainty when they ask about certain good. If you need to order, you can work out the specifics then and there and leave a much different and considerably better impression in that buyer’s mind:
“This business cares about my satisfaction. I’ll be back!”
Doesn’t that sound like a much better deal?