Inventory Management Tips for Independent Retailers

The importance of properly managing your retail store’s inventory cannot be overemphasized. You need to know what’s moving, what’s not moving and how much of everything that you have in order to maintain a healthy bottom line. Losing track of your inventory is a recipe for disaster. If a customer can’t find what they’re looking for because it is not in stock, you can’t expect them to sit around waiting for it. More than likely, they are going to look elsewhere. With that in mind, it is critical to put good inventory management tips to use each and every day. You can learn a few of the very best pointers below.

Set an Inventory Schedule and Stick to It

Without scheduling specific days and times to count your inventory, it is all too easy to keep putting it off. There is no such thing as counting your inventory too frequently; counting it too infrequently is where the trouble starts. The best way to ensure that your store’s inventory is counted regularly is by setting a schedule. Once you have created a schedule, share it with all of your employees so that everyone is on the same page. By having as many hands on deck during inventory as possible, you will be able to get through it quickly and painlessly. Compared with putting pen to paper – which used to be the only option – modern inventory counting is quite a lot easier. Which leads me too my next point…

Use Cutting-Edge Tools to Make Inventory Counting Easier

There are many amazing new tools that simplify the process of counting a store’s inventory. The best part is that many of them are basically free. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch at your disposal, for instance, you can download a free app that allows you to sync your store’s inventory with the information that’s in your POS system. The app is called Retail Inventory, an app developed by my company Cashier Live. We use the camera to scan barcodes, which then looks the item up in your inventory and tells you how many should be in stock. You can verify or change the quantity, price, and cost, all of which is stored on the app and can then be synced with your POS system. This is a simple, streamlined way to ensure that everything is adding up like it should be. Learn more about our iPhone inventory app on Cashier Live’s website.

Make Effective Use of Reports

The data that is culled from your official inventories can be used to refresh and populate reports from your POS register. While you can run reports at any time, its important to do periodic inventory counts to make sure your data is accurate. Even the most careful employees in the world make mistakes from time to time, which is why it’s so crucial to count your inventory fairly regularly.

The reports that are generated can be used in a countless number of ways. You can analyze the data to determine which items are hot sellers – and which ones are collecting dust. You can get a feel for the typical turnaround rates for the items on your shelves, which will make it easier to stock up on them in an efficient way. Things change over time. What’s hot today might be a dud tomorrow. The only way to notice such changes quickly and strategically is by running reports as often as possible.

Receive New Inventory with Care

You should never blindly trust the packing list that comes along with an inventory shipment. Just because the sheet indicates that a certain number of items are there doesn’t mean that they actually are. The people who pack these orders are human; they often make mistakes. Or maybe your supplier ran out of a particular item and now it’s back-ordered. You’ll surely run into shorted items on occasion. In some cases, you might even receive extras. In either case, it is important to conduct a mini-inventory on every shipment that you receive. If you can’t get the numbers straight right off the bat, what hope is there of maintaining accurate information about what you have on hand?

The preceding advice merely touches on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to inventory management. It definitely pays to study up on the topic in order to keep things under control in your store. Items that sit on the shelves for too long are tying up precious space and money; those that can’t be kept on the shelves could prompt otherwise loyal customers to go elsewhere. With all of that in mind, make inventory management a top priority. Over time, it will pay off in the form of increased sales and a healthier bottom line.

Article contributed by Tom Greenhaw from Cashier Live. After working with a wide variety of independent retailers, Tom realized that their needs weren’t being met by traditional point-of-sale packages available. He conceived Cashier Live as the next step in retail software, and today thousands of retailers rely on it to manage their store’s. You can learn more about it at http://www.cashierlive.com or follow them @CashierLive.