Stock Management Software: Know Why It’s Important and its Benefits for Small Businesses

No matter what industry your business is in. It would be best if you had the right stock management system to handle your inventory accurately.

Stock management system is required to know what exactly you have in your warehouse. Also, you get to know how you deal with different operations associated with it.

In this digital age, manual intervention cannot optimize your stock effectively. Thus, having the right software is the paramount solution for both the customer and the business owner. Inventory management includes the entire office and accounting systems. Now, businesses optimize stock by integrating with efficient inventory management software.

Article Index…

• Why Stock Management Software is Important?
• Benefits of Best Stock Management Software
• Issues faced in store stock management :
• Disadvantage if you don’t have it.
• How to Select a compatible stock management software

What is Stock Management Software and why is it important?

Whether you run a small or large business, maintaining regular stock is essential for better business transparency. It is up to you to adopt new technological methods to increase profits and businesses.

A good stock management software is essential for all businesses. This eliminates a lot of manual tasks that reduce the financial stress on the business and lead the business to financial gain. It is used to manage inventory, bill, track product, shipment, forecast, and manage sales. Also, it helps in planning, predicting inventory management based on customer behavior, reducing labor costs, and manual errors.

Stock management software is now widely used by industries because-

• Finishes working on the spreadsheet.
• Reduces human error in manipulating data.
• Easily update the inventory in real-time according to the changing stock.
• Analyzes sales and predict business profits.
• Generates reports easily.

1. Planning Stocks: It helps plan stock/ inventory. It aids in buying, storing, and selling processes. It also ensures that the right stock is available when needed. And solves understocking and overstocking problems.
2. Reduces Overselling: It keeps you updated on the status of different stocks. They tell you whether they are overstocked, understocked, or on backorder. This helps the retailer avoid overselling a particular stock.
3. Track trends in sales: With stock management, business owners can track product orders, sales, supply, and deliveries. This makes it easy, especially for wholesale business owners to gain insights into a particular product.
4. Trace Inconsistencies or Theft: When you have accurate and complete data about stocks it becomes easy and quick for you to trace any inconsistencies in the stocks. Thus, this software keeps a check on employee infidelity and acts as a theft deterrent at the same time.

Top Benefits of having a Good Stock Management Software

1. Simplified inventory management

The most important advantage of using stock management system is that it makes controlling your inventory easier, saving you time and money. It helps you remove the risk of man-made errors by making your business activities automatic when supply and demand are inconstant throughout the year, and your stock levels change.

2. Automated restocking

It is essential to oversee your product replenishment. And there’s no better way than relying on automated restocking, a feature of the software. Because you may now automate order proposals if specific criteria are met. The only thing you have to worry about with the right inventory management platform is evaluating order alerts and approving your order proposals.

3. Keeps count of stock

Conducting regular stock takes is an important part of the inventory control process. This entails counting every single thing in your inventory. It helps you to make a note of inventory and organize your warehouse. This is significant because it ensures that you are aware of the location of each unit as well as the quality and condition of each product.

4. Increases efficiency and productivity

Barcode systems are a great tool vastly used in stock management. The barcode system speeds up the billing and delivery process. As a result, it gives a hands-on way to reduce management costs and enhance productivity. Its barcodes printing and scanning feature enhances the tracking system of stocks that comes into or out of a warehouse.

In this way, it improves stock management and contributes to the growth of the business. And, it eliminates manual processes so that your employees can focus on other important business areas.

It mainly delivers: –

• Simplicity
• Cost-effectiveness
• Eliminate error
• Secure
• Saves time

5. Improves the accuracy of inventory orders

Another benefit of stock management software is that it helps to improve accuracy. The software facilitates well-defined processes end processes that maintain the stocks. This gives the exact number of items that are physically present in the stock.

Furthermore, it gives you a view of all your stocks in one platform so that you can make informed decisions for your business. With the help of this information, you can optimize your inventory in terms of advancing sales and accuracy in inventory orders.

6. Facilitates more organized warehouse

A good stock management strategy supports an organized warehouse. The stock management software primarily manages your inventory for a better view of goods and items. A better view eases the delivery and shipping orders and ensures that everything is in its place.

This way, you save money by wasting far less time searching for items.   It helps to speed up the order fulfillment process and keeps customers happy. This way, you can spend more time focusing on other, more important business matters.

7. Helps save time and money

It helps you to save money and time. It eliminates the need for manual processing of operations involved in it. Also, improves customer retention and helps in keeping the business organized.

This way, it works for meeting customer demand and deliver the right products or services when demanded by the customer. Also, it gives real-time updates and decreases human errors. In this way, it directly helps in saving time and money.

8. Notifies you when stock runs low

An efficient stock management software system notifies that the right stocks stay in the right place at the right time. Also, it ensures that the stock is maintained at the right quantity and plans that it should never be lower than the requirement nor higher. For this, it informs businesses of low stock alerts, new shipment alerts, slow-moving alerts, and bulk & large order alerts.

In this way, it serves businesses to maintain operational control, inform them about when to increase or decrease product prices.

9. Helps with inventory accounting

Inventory accounting is a key aspect of stock management. It calculates the cost of goods sold and the value of physical inventory over time. This means you can keep track of dead products that no longer have value, reducing waste and making inventory valuation easier. Dead stock can be a major expense that reduces profitability by stalling revenue, increasing carrying costs and taking up valuable warehouse space. You can save money by simply having the items you need on hand if you keep track of dead stock.

10. Offer latest reports and analysis

Reporting and analytics are critical for any store as they provide company performance information. Obtaining data and accurately evaluating it allows you to make well-informed judgments about things like stock ordering and replenishment, among other things. However, mistakes can occur if your data is not up to date and appropriately integrated. To avoid business headaches, choose an electronic inventory management system that can give you the most up-to-date information on your inventory’s performance in a single glance.

Some other important benefits:

1. Relations with vendors/suppliers: Stock management provides details on sales, supply, and sales volume for every product. Business owners can use this information to build better relations with specific suppliers. They can even negotiate for a better price. This partnership helps businesses make better decisions about the choice of suppliers and avoids any last-minute hassles concerning the supply.
2. Increasing profits: Stock management system gives better insights into stock availability and sales volume. Businesses can improve their profitability by ordering only those products that have demand in the market and sells. This way both the cost of occupied space and stock redundancy can be lowered.
3. Customer satisfaction: You will agree that customers prefer suppliers/ businesses that can supply goods to them immediately. Quick order supply satisfies the customers and makes them loyal to the business. With software to manage all your stocks, you can track all the fast-moving stock. and replenish them immediately. Thus, for other sellers who might need 3-4 days or even weeks to supply, you can have the order processed and completed within hours.
4. Automation of manual tasks: Barcode scanning in the system eliminates manual data entry. This makes the entry and exit level calculations smooth and more accurate. It also helps save a lot of time and effort.

Issues faced in store stock management :

Warehouse efficiency – Inventory management controls at the warehouse requires a lot of manpower and involves many tasks, including receiving, packing, and shipping of products . The objective is to perform all these tasks in the most efficient way possible.

Change in demand – The needs of customers are always changing. Having too much inventory could result in outmoded inventory that you can’t sell, while keeping too little inventory could prevent you from fulfilling customer requests.

Manual documentation – Inventory management using paperwork and manual processes is inefficient and insecure. It also doesn’t scale well across numerous warehouses with a lot of inventory.

Inventory loss – There can be a loss of inventory due to spoilage, damage or theft . It requires identifying, tracking and measuring problem areas.

Over stocking – Having too much inventory on hand might be just as bad as having too little. Overstock negatively a company’s cash flow and can lead to inventory-related issues like storage and loss.

Disadvantages of not having stock management software:

1. Increased cost: Without a robust inventory management system you will never be able to track your inventory. Hence business owners would end up paying for products that may not profit your business.
2. Lacking Tracking: Businesses may have a hard time tracing their inventory if they lack inventory management. Thus, it becomes hard for them to trace theft or loss of stock due to any reason.
3. Reduced customer loyalty: When customers have to wait for long to get their orders delivered, it leads to low customer loyalty. With proper inventory management, sellers can track their stocks and replenish fast-moving goods in time. Without software, the seller will first have to get an order, place it with their suppliers and ensure its delivery that might take weeks to process.
4. Leads delay in decision making: Handling inventory manually slows down the tracking process. Thus, a seller might come to know about replenishing a stock when it ends up. This leads to delays in placing a purchasing order and supplying it to an end customer.

Watch How to Do Stock Management with RetailGraph ERP Software

How to choose a compatible stock management software:

To choose the best stock management software for your business, you need to consider these points –

1. Look at your hardware: Hardware status is important in deciding the right software. Certain software needs resources to work well. This software might even need powerful computers to run. You may need to upgrade your hardware. If you don’t wish to do so then you must opt for hardware that is compatible with your existing resources.
2. Data import and export: Choose a software that can import/ export files in many extensions. This is especially important if you have been using a different program and want to import those files to your current software.
3. User-Interface: Businesses have to decide on the acceptable complexity of the system. A system that is complex to understand may need training the employee on it. A system with an easy interface eliminates training and helps in better management.

Wrapping Up

The above key factors explain to us how essential stock management software solutions are for any retailer, business owners, or entrepreneurs. It keeps a database of the goods you have stocked in your warehouse or store and uses it at the right time. It makes your customer happy and helps you to increase sales.

Indeed, in the present time, one cannot depend on manual labor for everything. With technologies like Stock Management Software, one can save a lot of time and effort. They can be more accurate in their operations.

A good Inventory management system allows you to take all your inventory-related decisions by looking at the reports. There are many stock management software available in the market.

You can contact our SWIL team that has more than 28 years of experience in retail, wholesale, and pharmaceutical software development. We have a proficient team of developers that will assist you and your business needs in the best way possible.