You're a successful small business owner, but you're still using paper and pencil or spreadsheets to keep track of your inventory. It's growing leaps and bounds. Suddenly, you find yourself with a lot of inventory and your costs for administering it are sky rocketing. You realize your business could be more profitable, if you could manage your inventory better. Where will you store the extra inventory? You may need to buy a larger warehouse than you really need or rent trailers if your warehouse isn’t big enough. Plus, you have to provide security to prevent theft. And don’t forget about the money that’s tied up in inventory that you could have used to hire personnel or grow your business in other ways. Simple question. Have you considered using an inventory management system.
Another important point, if you have too many products in your warehouse, you increase the risk that they will become obsolete, damaged or stolen, before you can sell them all. Depending on which industry you’re in, you’re probably more worried about some of these risks than others. For example, if you’re in the technology industry, you don’t want your expensive products to become outdated, damaged or stolen, but you probably don’t care about their freshness date.
On the other end of the inventory management issue, if you have too few products in your warehouse, you face a whole other set of problems. Your customers don’t want to wait too long to get their orders shipped to them. So if you run out of the products they’re looking for or if you're picking, packing and shipping processes are too slow, you could drive customers away.
Inventory management can be time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to do it by hand or in Excel spreadsheets. Speed is everything in business. How fast you reorder products, ship customer orders and update your inventory records could make or break your company. You don't have time to learn a complex piece of software, let alone train your other employees to use it. Enter Stockpile. The free online inventory management system with an easy to use interface. All you need is a computer, a tablet, or a smart phone to sign up for it and access your company's important inventory data. Check it out.
