With a squeeze on bank lending, and rising costs of raw materials, all companies, and especially new businesses, need to get to grips with stock control. If your company struggles with stock control, you are not alone.
Wasp Barcode Technologies’ survey into Stock Control in UK SMEs showed that:
- Half of UK companies have lost sales due to low stock levels- 47% of companies questioned admitted that they have difficulty keeping stock records up to date and had sometimes not been able to locate stock that they thought they had.
- Worryingly, one third of the companies surveyed, had seen an increase in the amount of stock written off due to unexplained losses.
It costs money to hold items in stock, so there are real benefits to be had from bringing stock under control. Stock represents working capital tied up, so it makes sense to hold only what you need in stores, however, will you have enough stock to fulfil every order you receive without keeping customers waiting for deliveries?
Add to that the minutes and hours that you and your staff spend searching for supplies, and the cost of writing off stock that is lost or past its sell-by date, and you have a clear business case for using a stock control package.
New businesses often start out using Excel spreadsheets for stock control, but most find they outgrow this, and want to move up to a “proper” stock control package. Barcodes are popular, because they are inexpensive to use and give you a fast way to scan stock in and out.
A proper stock control package will tell you exactly where your stock is, and when you need to re-order, and will help you to understand the underlying trends in your business.
It will also tell you how much stock to hold, trigger minimum re-order levels to remind you to purchase more supplies, and it will give you reports that help you to understand seasonal sales patterns, so that you know when to order extra items.
Real-time stock control is a newer way to manage stock, and is certainly worth having if your stock keeps changing. If you have real-time inventory, you can ensure your stock data is always accurate, and if you have several stores and warehouses and a number of staff working there, a team of people can use the same system.
Another big advantage of real-time inventory tracking is that you no longer have to update the system with a “batch” computer run. The stock records are always up to date, and that’s essential for small and medium-sized businesses that demand efficiency.
A good stock control package gives you tools that will allow you to stop searching for stock you thought you had, and start managing it instead.
It is beneficial if you can attach images and files to inventory records for easy identification and access, and a good system will provide you with a choice of stock valuation methods, including LIFO, FIFO, and Moving Average, which will help you to get a much more accurate view of your capital tied up in stock.
It is easy to get started with this kind of package as you can usually import a file of your stock items directly from an external source, which might be your old Excel spreadsheet.
Hugh Furness, Sales and Marketing Director of Wasp Barcode Technologies UK.
www.waspbarcode.co.uk
