Maintaining an inaccurate inventory is a sure way to increase inventory management costs, lower your order fulfillment rate, and annoy customers. A simple but effective inventory control and planning solution with a reorder point inventory management feature can considerably improve the accuracy of your inventory. In addition, here are some vitals tips on improving inventory accuracy.
- Digitize your inventory tracking
Manual inventory tracking is not only prone to human errors, but also time-consuming – it can increase the size and multiply the responsibilities of your inventory team considerably. If you own or manage a small business, you may think you don’t need automated inventory tracking that uses barcode scanning to feed data to an inventory control and planning solution. But if you are selling products that fall into different categories and come from different suppliers, automated inventory tracking can make a huge difference, not only by keeping your inventory accurate, but also by helping you manage it.
- Use a continuous cycle-counting process
Inventory cycle counting is one of the most effective approaches to maintaining an accurate inventory. Cycle counting validates the accuracy of your inventory by continuously counting a portion of it, until all of it is gradually counted. It improves your inventory replenishment process, makes your inventory management more effective, and gradually eliminates major inventory counting errors from your system.
- Improve vendor data transmission
Inventory inaccuracies are sometimes external, stemming from data transmission errors. If your order-related data is transmitted through email attachments, rather than through a systematized data transmission process, inventory inaccuracies are bound to crop up eventually. Ideally, you want to work with vendors whose systems either integrate with your inventory control and planning solution or else provide data in an accessible format that is easy to import into your system.
- Take the time to create detailed product descriptions
Even if you track your inventory with an online inventory app, inaccuracies may creep in if the description for each product is not sufficiently detailed. Ideally, inventory description should be provided for every item by the vendor, but this is not always the case. Manually adding and/or correcting inventory descriptions can be a painstaking process, but it can have a major impact on the quality of your inventory management. It will enable you to find, sort, and manage your stock more easily.
- Make your shipments easy to track
Items lost or damaged during shipment as well as returns can reduce the accuracy of your inventory unless they are effectively tracked. You don’t want these to linger in your inventory as ghost items, or to gather dust in some warehouse. If your e-commerce business sells products that can be easily returned, such as clothes, accessories, or hardware, you can be especially affected by returns and lost shipments. The best solution is to integrate a reliable inventory tracking system into your inventory control and planning app.
Keeping your inventory accurate is a challenge. But this challenge becomes easier with an Intuit QuickBooks app for inventory such as DataQlick, which was designed to simplify, streamline, and optimize inventory management. Find our more about DataQlick here.
