Establishing and maintaining a precise inventory valuation is crucial for any product based business to thrive; and the importance of having a solid, reliable inventory management system in place cannot be overstated. When your inventory quantities are on point, you’re able to meet and even exceed customers’ expectations. Your ability to know the proper quantities at every location allows you to serve your customers with confidence knowing that you can meet their needs. Knowing what you have at any given moment also means that you’re able to fill orders properly and make your deliveries on time. But when your counts are off, or otherwise unreliable, a whole host of problems arise, and a negative ripple effect ensues.
Related: The next step accounting solution for growing SMBs
Inaccurate inventory levels can lead to, including, but not limited to…
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Delayed and missed delivery times. Your usually loyal customers, who wanted your product, have gone to a competitor for something that’s comparable, and available.
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Components of finished products are unavailable at your main site or assembly plant. You’re ACME Rockets, and you thought you had that Spacely Sprocket part in stock, and you were looking forward to filling that huge seasonal order for your biggest customer, Mr. Coyote. But he cancelled the order because you couldn’t fill it on time, and he’s not happy.
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Not knowing what’s already been promised, set aside, or otherwise allocated. This leads to confusion and disarray. If you have an employee pulling items or components from stock for an order that just came in, while another employee already allocated a large portion of the same item for another order, you’re going to miss the boat on not one, but possibly multiple orders.
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Now you’ve found yourself placing a new order for product or components you already have. Now you have too much of an item, you’re at the mercy of your vendors to crank out a rush order, and you’re likely paying a lot more for a smaller quantity. And you’re cringing as you watch your profits evaporate.
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Inaccurate inventory counts lead to customer dissatisfaction and a depleted customer base. With product(s) unavailable, your customers have gone elsewhere, not just this once. You may have lost them for good, because there’s no guarantee they’ll take a chance on you again. After all, why would a great customer, who’s ready and willing to pay, give your business another try, when your competitor, all bright and shiny, is smiling with a store full of available product?
If you’re dealing with the ripple effects of inaccurate inventory levels, your problems could stem from any number of poor management practices. If you’re relying on multiple manual counts, complete with clipboard and pencil in hand, you’re headed for a world of inaccuracy. If you have multiple team members pulling product and promising those same items for multiple orders, your problems will multiply exponentially. And if you’re failing to record transfers of products or components from one site to another, you’re in for it.
But what if you had a precision-based inventory management system in place? And what if it didn’t require your hardworking team to set aside huge windows of time every week to perform multiple manual counts? And if you had a reliable accounting system in place, one that not only tracks inventory of every item at every location, but effectively manages counts, transfers, and allocations, you’d be over the moon, right? Or rather, you’d find your solution in a cloud.
Track and manage your inventory
While there are many cloud-based solutions out there that offer inventory tracking features, your business needs a solution that effectively tracks and manages your inventory. Your inventory management system is more than just counting accurately. It should provide all of the following:
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Intuitive management capabilities to reduce and eliminate the need for manual inputting processes.
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Real-time visibility into your inventory with secure access anytime and anywhere to critical information and updates.
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Seamless integration with demand planning, financials and logistics.
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Promotion and maximization of efficiencies from start to finish of the inventory
When you’re looking to the cloud, consider a software solution that proactively manages and tracks for you. That’s right: harness the power of Gravity Software® (Gravity). Gravity is written on the Microsoft Power Platform (aka Dynamics 365 CRM). A reliable and solid platform that hosts over 5 million users worldwide. With true multi-location inventory tracking capabilities, Gravity gives you the ability to track, control and manage your products wherever you do business. From Warehouse #’s 1 and 2, to your assembly plant, to that distribution hub, to your retail stores, each location can control its own pricing, reordering and stocking characteristics. With FIFO, LIFO, Weighted Average, Standard and even specific item costing; you get a precise profit analysis on every sale.
Ultimately, you’ll save time and money because you’ll know what you have at each location, so you can determine what you need and when. By utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform, Gravity makes it simple for businesses to track and analyze multi-location inventory from anywhere, at any time without all the startup costs associated with other accounting applications. Learn more and schedule your online demo so you realize the possibilities with Gravity.
Gravity Software
Better. Smarter. Accounting.
