Inventory management is one of the key departments in most of the business where people sale something to clients. If inventory is managed properly then it will not make you cry but if not then it is seriously capable of making you lose your clients and market reputation and ultimately it will hamper your business. If you have good inventory management then it is very capable of pleasing customers, boosting market repo and helping business.

People use different styles of managing inventory, for instance some uses highlighting their best selling items so they never run out of it and can maintain majority of customers satisfied. Well, this isn’t a bad way. There are few more tips you can use to avoid inventory breakdown.

1. Excessive inventory isn’t a good idea

Many times businessmen or inventory managers are scared of running out of goods as the market is unexpected, so they over fill their inventories in the anticipation. This is not a good idea. Excessive inventory can block your working capital and eat away profits. We all know maintaining inventory isn’t free. There are many expenses like warehousing, security, etc. Excess inventory comes with the risk of damage, depreciation and obsolescence. Today in the era of ever changing technology you don’t know when one thing becomes obsolete. Logistics expert says that if you have excessive inventory then there are chances of vending to discounters, or transporting it to foreign receivers. To avoid such mishaps you should start with checking your previous sales and make next inventory purchase accordingly. If you product is seasonal then make sure you keep that in mind as well.

2. It is important to keep track of your inventory

After being sure about what you need, you have to actually acquire that much of inventory on hand. There are serious chances of missing or miscounting items either while receiving, shifting or fulfilling orders. To stay away from such errors you can use technology like software with bar code scanning facility, asset tracking feature, etc. For example: - Fishbowl Inventory Software. It can help you in tracking assets carefully, eliminating the chances of err.

3. Set Priorities

Tracking details for each item present in your inventory can be tedious. So it is suggested to make a priority list and mark them with appropriate signs or colors. Be sure that the items of immense importance gets your proper attention, you should not miss them because you were busy keeping track some not so important items. Divide items in three categories, for example: - RED should be for the items with 80 percent or more value, Yellow can be for items with 30 to 80 percent importance, and Green for not so important goods. You are definitely free to choose categories and symbol according to your own convenience.

4. Use Technology

You may feel that it’s obvious to use spreadsheets like MS excel for the purpose of tracking inventory but we all know it’s so easy to lose or delete that spreadsheet from the bundle of huge data we have. It is more risky because there are multiple people who work together to maintain inventory. It is suggested to use applications like QuickBooks add-on to keep records of inventory. I know that you thought QuickBooks was an accounting software, yes it is but it has inventory add-ons as well. You may go for Fishbowl inventory hosting as this will provide you multiple benefits and will simplify your inventory management. Cloud computing services for Fishbowl inventory software comes with all-time access to data i.e. you can control or check your inventory from anyplace at any time. Cloud hosting service provider will offer you rolling data backup so you can be tension free. Fishbowl inventory software in itself is an extremely efficient tool which will help you to maintain Optimal Inventory, Tracking Assets, Prioritizing Items and staying updated.

Author's Bio: 

James Watson is an IT analyst at Real Time Data Services which is a leading Cloud Hosting and Application Hosting company. The company specializes in hosting many software including accounting software (QuickBooks, Peachtree), QuickBooks add-ons, ( Fishbowl Inventory Hosting ), (eBridge, SourceLink Hosting), (ACT! Hosting), Windows Server, MS office Server, Tax software (ProSeries, Drake, Lacerte, ATX), CRM software, MS Project, MS office, MS SQL Server (SharePoint, Exchange), and also hosts many other software.