Take Stock of Your Stock

The holidays are coming, so it’s time to get your ship into shape when it comes to stocking and managing inventory.

Spring Cleaning, Fall Organizing

First things first.  Find downtime, to do a complete inventory count of what you have in your store. To do so, be sure to count items you see in your shop, including the basement, the backroom and anywhere else you keep product. Count in an organized fashion so that if you get interrupted you can pick back up again where you left off. Update your POS inventory system with all your counts.

Forget the Pen and Paper

The beauty of using a cloud-based point of sale system is that you can walk around with your smartphone and update your inventory directly or take a few quick notes that you can input into the system in a fast and efficient manner. It makes a world of difference to be able to remotely input your inventory, especially when your warehouse is miles away from your store. That way your inventory is always up to date and as your new orders come in you can quickly adjust your stock.

Adjust, Refresh & Sync

Once that task is complete, export all your inventory and sort by last counted so that you can find items that may show inventory in your system but were not actually in your store.  Then either look for those items or update your POS inventory to “0” for those items. Now you have the correct count and dollar value of inventory in your system. You can also make sure that the inventory is synced with your online store, avoiding selling out of stock products, but also not missing sales for your new inventory.

Holiday Anticipation

After having counted (and maybe even recounted), now is the time to make adjustments for the holiday demand. It can’t hurt to look at last year’s data to anticipate what will happen this year. Most likely you will want to raise your restock levels. This is the level at which you want to think about reordering it. Most POS systems will provide a reorder report for you. Be prepared and adjust these levels in advance to reflect the busier season. Vendor lead times may also change with the Holidays, which is worth taking into consideration.

Optimize

To get the most out of your inventory management system be sure to properly categorize items into departments and categories so you can get a high level view of sales by department. This will help you understand what departments and categories are selling the best and what trends you will want to capitalize on.

Contributed by Jason Richelson, CEO and Founder of ShopKeep POS. Still confused or need a POS system to do all of this? Check out ShopKeep POS, an affordable iPad POS that lets you ring up sales, manage inventory, get robust reporting, access data remotely via your smart phone, and more  – all for $49/mo. Give our friendly POS Specialists a call to learn more about how a robust inventory management system can help you grow your business at 800-820-9814.

Photo Credit: ShopKeep POS Founder Jason Richelson was a retailer himself, allowing him to understand first hand what retailers need from a POS system.