One of the most common obstacles a business will ever face is managing its inventory. Accurate inventory management can prove to be very challenging, especially if there are multiple storage locations and many products to handle.
Nevertheless, an accurate inventory will give you valuable insight into your business’s operations, pain points, and strengths. Therefore, targeting your efforts towards managing your inventory in the best way possible will positively affect your business in various ways and domains.
1. Timely Restocking
This is a significant advantage for a business to know when it will need to restock without risking understocking or overstocking. In case your stock is not enough, you risk declining or delaying a client’s orders. Either way, you will lose income as well as the trust of your customers.
On the other hand, if you overstock your inventory, you will face a new set of obstacles. Extra items mean more space taken in your warehouse and more money spent on maintaining these facilities. Those excess products also imply that you will have freezing funds put towards buying them, which you could otherwise put towards improving any other domain of your enterprise.
2. Better Client Service
As mentioned before, a disorganized inventory can harm your clients as well.
Picture this. You have finally found the item you were searching for for hours on the web, and now you are ready to buy it. You placed your order and everything seems to go smoothly. Until you get a call or an email saying that their inventory count was incorrect and your item is no longer available. Chances are that you will not buy anything else from that company ever again, or you will leave a bad review regarding that incident.
This creates mistrust between you and your customers, while it also creates a negative image of your business. It is imperative that your business accommodates its customers’ needs accurately and fast.
3. Well-organized Warehouse
Accurate inventory management leads to an organized warehouse where everything is counted, preventing the loss of items due to untracked stock. Nothing can go missing if it is in its assigned place in the warehouse or imported into an inventory management software.
Moreover, your business can track the sales rate of each item. That will give you precious information about which product to discontinue or which ones to produce at a higher rate.
You can learn more about optimizing your warehouse operations here!
4. Satisfied Employees
A well-categorized and orderly warehouse helps employees to be better and faster informed about a product’s availability. Subsequently, they won’t have to spend much time searching through a disorganized warehouse for an item. Hence, they will be able to target their efforts primarily on customer service.
Additionally, when your stock is precise, your business does not need to conduct a full inventory count. This process needs lots of staff to be done correctly and it can be very tiring, hectic, and time-consuming. With an accurate inventory, your personnel will be glad to hear that they won’t need to go through that process.
5. Avoid Employee Theft
It is a tough matter to discuss and most employers do not believe that this could happen in their business. However, according to an Embroker research employee theft causes more than 30% of business bankruptcies, making it a very real and harmful issue.
When a company’s inventory is documented and tracked, it is highly unlikely for products to go missing and nobody notices. This will deter employees with stealing tendencies, due to the high chance of getting caught red-handed.
Summing Up
All in all, having a clear view of your inventory and its needs is the foundation of a successful business. Accurate inventory management can be very valuable for your business, but it can also be a very hard task to do with pen and paper.
An online inventory management software like Megaventory could offer you all the benefits mentioned above and do all the heavy lifting for you!
Do you have any questions about this?
Book a free, no strings attached chat with us to learn how the Megaventory team can help.
Zoi Vasileiou works as a Marketing Assistant for Megaventory the online inventory management system that can help businesses synchronize stock and manage purchases and sales over multiple stores. She loves content creation, keeping up with the latest marketing updates, and always enhancing her skills.