Speed Up Physical Inventory
Physical inventory is a necessary function for any retail business. It's the time of year where you need to tidy up your inventory, identify shrinkage and make any adjustments to get things back on track. Knowing that your inventory is accurate is an important objective; you need to make sure your business is running successfully.
Traditionally, when a retailer is in the process of preparing to take physical inventory, it involves a great deal of time. Time before-hand to allocate work hours, time spent determining who will count, what will be counted, and how the inventory will be taken. There may even be time spent moving inventory in preparation to take inventory.
Search and Adjust
Old-school physical inventory involved printing a list of all inventory, and then spending time searching and counting the inventory. After that, it was up to someone to compare the physical count with the count that was in the inventory system and if there was a discrepancy, they would have to manually make an adjustment to inventory. This was a long and tedious process which did not guarantee success.
But with new times comes new technology that can make this part of your business much more accurate and efficient.
It all starts with the bar code. A bar code enables the retailer the ability to quickly read and record information. Performing physical inventory before bar codes was a tedious task. It would require many people, and often times businesses had to be closed for several days. (Remember the signs, "Closed for inventory?")
To implement bar codes, you will need a point of sale solution. Combine that with the right technologies, such as laptops, hand-held data collection units and workstations, and you can cut the time spent on physical inventory by more than 50%.
Scan and Import
If you've implemented a bar code system, your physical inventory process becomes a simple Scan and Import. The process to achieve this could be to use a hand held unit or a laptop equipped with a bar code scanner. You would be able to start at one corner of the store or warehouse and begin scanning items and counting. It doesn't matter what item you're scanning. You simply have to scan each item in your store. When you are finished with the scanning process, you can import the data you've collected into your POS system and the inventory database. For instance, PayGo only requires a simple physical inventory list that contains just 2 columns. An Item ID and the Quantity counted.
Once that is loaded you can automatically adjust your count to coincide with your physical counts with the click of a button. With that, you are done with your physical inventory. You can do this for a small group of items or for your complete inventory database.
Conclusion
The use of a point of sale system should allow you to maintain an accurate inventory. By following the correct procedures, you will also be able to increase productivity and speed up processes. PayGo's physical inventory process is just one example on how you can make your business run better.
