When it comes to inventory, less can be more. Applying a set of inventory reduction methods can help you streamline your inventory to manage it more easily and increase your quarterly profits. With a QuickBooks mobile inventory app applying these methods becomes easier.
Negotiate Faster Supplier Lead-Times
Working with slow suppliers means you have to carry more safety stock. Even if this stock is not very large, it can still add to the cost of keeping inventory. You can use an inventory forecasting app to understand what items are gathering dust in your inventory and an inventory control app to figure out the suppliers behind them.
Keeping an up-to-date list of your suppliers together with past purchase order data also helps. Even if you have to give up on certain suppliers, the flexibility that comes with faster supplier lead-times is well worth it.
Optimize Your Purchase Orders
With effective inventory forecasting it’s possible to optimize both the size of your orders and their frequency. In this way you can order optimal quantities for all the items you stock. The advantage of using a QuickBooks mobile inventory app is that you get real-time alerts on stock quantities and can set up purchase orders automatically based on simple stock depletion rules. You will be able to order smaller quantities more often, avoiding the risks of overstock and the dangers of changing purchase trends.
Centralize Inventory Control
How many inventory tools and planning models are you using? Are different categories of stock being managed from different locations by different people using different tools? For many organizations, this is why their stock grows beyond optimal levels and reduces their profitability.
Enforce instead a unified inventory management model using a mobile inventory control app that brings together all the essential inventory tools you need, including forecasting, ordering, and analytics.
Dispose of Obsolete Inventory Faster
Obsolete inventory includes both items that have been in your stock for more than 12 months and old versions of items that have been superseded by newer releases. Identifying these items can be difficult if you don’t monitor product life cycles for every individual item. Without automation, this task can be onerous.
Once obsolete stock is identified, it may be possible to sell it. Even if you won’t recover your investment, the long-term cost of carrying obsolete inventory is in most cases too great for you to just keep it there and hope it will sell eventually.
Although businesses with a varied product catalog and a lot of items for sale can have a harder time reducing inventory, with the right QuickBooks mobile inventory app this can be achieved in a timely manner.