What is inventory management?

Inventory management is the continuous monitoring and maintenance of a business’ inventory levels. It’s much more than just a stock count and includes all the administrative tasks involved with measuring incoming stock, outgoing stock and all the inventory in your warehouse.

Inventory management is one of the most time-consuming and dreaded tasks carried out by wholesalers behind the scenes. It can be painstakingly boring and steals staff away from focusing on more important facets of the business.

However, inventory management is also of paramount importance to a business’ operations and, as we’ll learn below, is a vital administrative task to get right.

Why is inventory management important?

When it comes to inventory management, it pays to be precise. Stock is the lifeblood of your business so maintaining the right stock levels is crucial to your operations. Inventory management is important for several reasons...

Firstly, because it informs you how much stock you have on hand. It tells you whether you have enough for your forecasted sales or whether you need to order more. There’s not much use in closing sales if you’ve run out of stock and have nothing left to sell!

Secondly, inventory management reduces errors and ‘walking stock’. Constantly monitoring the levels of inventory means you can update your system and therefore update your financial records with how much you have tied up in stock to sell. Also, it’s sad but it’s true, some stock can go mysteriously missing by staff members with sticky fingers and inventory management minimises stock going ‘missing’.

Thirdly, inventory management tells you a story about your business. Unless you have records about amounts you’ve bought, amounts you’ve sold and amounts you hold, then you won’t know what sells well, what doesn’t and how you can change this to grow your business.

How can online inventory management software help your business grow?

Inventory management with TradeGecko is efficient and effective, allowing you to manage inventory on the go and eliminate the stock errors that give you a headache.

When it comes to efficiency, TradeGecko inventory management software understands the demands of today’s fast-paced business world and puts all your inventory information right at your fingertips. With one-click generation of stock reports, complete audits and stock movement history, stock takes are a breeze for your life on the move. Log into TradeGecko on your iPad or tablet and perform stock-takes from your desk or in the back of a taxi en route to your meeting!

As well as saving you time, TradeGecko effectively manages your inventory to reduce errors and prevent stock from going missing. Moving away from spreadsheets and the errors that come with manual data entry, TradeGecko stock management software measures how inventory moves through your overall business. All products and variants have an audit trail activity feed, so you know exactly what products went where, and when. TradeGecko requires any manual changes to stock levels to have a reason and date. The user can add a note to the stock change so products don’t just ‘go missing’.

It’s a catch-22, because this effective management of inventory reduces the amount of stock takes you’ll need to perform… saving you even more time! With better stock management you can stop wasting hours ticking items off a clipboard, reduce warehouse costs and get back to the core business tasks that really deserve your time.

Dare we say it… with TradeGecko you might even enjoy managing your stock!