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For retailers, inventory management and sound accounting go hand in hand so it stands to reason that a savvy accounting professional will provide their retail clients with exceptional services in both fields.
Because the link between these two fields is inextricable, it’s impossible to do one without the other. So why are so many retailers stuck with outdated inventory solutions?
Correctly managing inventory is a make-or-break issue for most retail clients. Too much inventory ties up all sorts of capital that could be better used elsewhere. Too little, on the other hand, leaves businesses unable to meet demand and provide a worthwhile customer experience. Either way, the result is inefficient processes and a dent in the bottom line.
A Modern Answer to an Age-Old Problem.
In the 2018 State of Small Business Report, Wasp Barcode Technologies found that over 40 percent of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) still rely on manual entry accounting or don’t track inventory at all. The downside of these antiquated methods are obvious. You need to spend time and money to manually enter inventory, you don’t have real-time data on stock levels, and you greatly increase the likelihood for human error and lost sales.
The prevalence of stone-age inventory practices is harder to comprehend in a technology age that offers so many solutions. Automated inventory services allow retailers to know exactly how many products they have on hand and where they are.
Workflows can be created to automatically order products when inventory reaches certain levels. Inventory information can talk to other parts of the accounting software to provide precise updates on where and when money is being spent.
Another important facet of modern inventory management is offering cloud-based backups of inventory data. If a business loses their inventory information, they have no recourse but to reboot from scratch. That could require dozens of man hours spent scanning thousands of items. A cloud-based backup ensures that you won’t have to scramble to recover your inventory by any means necessary. Forward-thinking practices can also help reduce shrinkage, a huge cost for most retailers.
When data entry is unclear and difficult to search, it becomes much harder to know when something is missing. Tracking inventory quickly and accurately allows the red flag to be raised much quicker.
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