What is the best way to manage your inventory? Is it through sage stock control software? Through old-fashioned pen and paper? Can you manage your inventory through spreadsheets? The first step to answering these questions is to know what your options are. Let’s take a look at four of the most common solutions today’s small businesses are using to manage their inventory. Then you can choose which one is a good fit for your company.
Handwritten Notes and Excel Spreadsheets
In 2015, Capterra noted that 46 percent of small and medium-size businesses either use a manual inventory management system or none at all to keep track of their parts and products. There’s a good reason why this number is so high. Most companies start out with an informal inventory management system, and they are neither ready nor on the lookout for anything in-depth.
Handwritten notes and Excel spreadsheets are the most popular manual tools SMBs use when they go this route. Practically every PC has some version of the Microsoft Office suite on it, so it makes sense that companies would take advantage of it to help them manage their inventory.
But both of these solutions have major flaws. Pieces of paper can be lost, smudged, destroyed, or stolen. There’s no audit trail in Excel to see who made which changes to a spreadsheet. Plus, if the employee who set up the manual inventory system ever leaves the company, he will most likely fail to leave behind documentation of how he set it up, which will create a big challenge for his replacement to figure it out and keep it going.
There’s got to be a better option. As it turns out, there are two significantly better ones: inventory apps and desktop inventory management software.
Inventory Apps
With any luck, the percent of SMBs using manual systems to manage inventory has decreased significantly in the last four years. There’s no reason to rely on pieces of paper or Excel spreadsheets when there are plenty of free apps and online solutions available. A big reason why SMBs are not making use of these free tools that can help them improve efficiency is because they don’t know they exist.
Boxstorm Forever Free is the first no-cost, cloud-based inventory management solution to integrate with QuickBooks Online. SMBs can use it to create items, change their quantities, scan items in and out, create multiple locations and units of measure, transfer inventory from one location to another, cycle count, import and export data in batches via CSV files, and view audit trails.
As companies grow and they want to do more things with their online inventory management solution, they can move on to more advanced versions of Boxstorm. Sales orders, purchase orders, payments, tax calculations, user permissions, stock alerts, and tracking criteria are found in the other Boxstorm versions.
Desktop Inventory Management Software
If an app isn’t sufficient for SMBs, they have the option to use desktop inventory management software. This is especially helpful if they want to gain access to more in-depth manufacturing and warehouse management features. So far, cloud-based solutions haven’t been able to match desktop software’s breadth of functionality, so many companies still use it.
Fishbowl has been the #1 selling manufacturing and warehouse management software for QuickBooks since 2004. QuickBooks users often make use of the accounting software’s inventory management features, but they usually find that they can’t handle their increasingly complex requirements. Instead of opting for an ERP or other expensive option, they can choose an inventory management solution like Fishbowl that integrates with QuickBooks to continue using the accounting software while adding inventory control tools.
Of course, that being said, at some stage in the growth of your business, working with a team of accountants is almost always going to be necessary. Especially with regards to ensuring that your taxes are up to date for example.
Put simply though, Fishbowl goes beyond Boxstorm’s features to let companies use multi-currency conversions in sales orders and purchase orders, integrate with dozens of other business solutions, generate work orders and bills of materials, use production stages, and more.
Looking Forward
That’s how today’s small businesses are managing their inventory. As we noted at the start, you can decide which of these options is best for your business. You can keep things informal with a manual system, add automation with the aid of a free inventory app, or implement a desktop solution to gain access to the most features. Maintenance of annual accounts, bookkeeping, and affordable tax solutions are some of the services provided by companies like them.
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