Integrate Your Inventory System - Program that Benefits Your Processes

Inventory management is knowing what you have in the warehouse and where your inventory is. However, unless it is integrated with a back-end system, the system itself can’t effectively optimize nor guarantee that the value of the inventory asset in the financial report corresponds to the value of the stock - without manual intervention and reconciliation.

How to Start Your Business Optimisation

To optimize inventory management, leading enterprises integrate a program directly into back office and accounting systems. This integration provides a competitive advantage that can be effectively planned, executed in a predictable manner with the customer, and minimizes labor costs and errors associated with manual reconciliation.

Determine the right management system and background integration strategy for your business needs to assess your needs today and your future growth plans.

For maximum benefit, your integrated solution must be real-time, flexible, transparent to the user, adaptable and extensible.

Why integrate inventory program to the back office?

The three main advantages of integrating a management program into accounting and back office systems are:

Optimize inventory to meet product availability and ROI targets
Provide visibility for supply chain partners
While there are other benefits between inventory and back-office systems, these three can have a significant impact on your company's bottom line.

Stock Optimization

Having the right mix and amount of stock is key to customer and investor satisfaction. Customers need "fresh" products and investors do not want limited working capital in stock. The goal of balancing these conflicts is complicated, and loading additional wastes more money than the initial investment in material and labor.

Activities such as inventory, stock, and redo consume additional working capital and can reduce the availability of products that customers need. Planning appropriate levels and quantities requires your sales order, and the planning and purchase order system checks inventory in real time.

Supply Chain Visibility

Many companies use supply chain partners to manage inventory levels and customer shipments. To do this efficiently, the system must be integrated with the company's administrative system, as well as with third-party suppliers, logistics companies or third-party logistics systems. By analyzing their raw materials and the goods retention levels, suppliers can guarantee that their products will be available when customers need them in their warehouse or in an external logistics company.

Accurate Financial Reporting

Make sure that the accuracy of your annual reports and tax returns is critical to your investors and government. The value of the inventory can be an important part of your declared assets, and the value of the records in your book should match the actual value in the deposit. The only effective way to ensure financial integrity in company reporting is to combine the transactions in your software system with the back-office chart of accounts.

Important Content of Integration

The inventory and integration of the back office system must be flexible in real time, transparent to the user, adjustable and scalable. Provide the best real-time visibility to customers and partners in the supply chain to ensure that financial reports are always up-to-date and accurate.

Integration with flexibility and transparency is desirable because continuous adjustment of business processes requires integration coordination. Users do not have to think about integration, they just work! Scalability can be overlooked during the integration project, but ignoring it becomes a problem if the company's success rate exceeds the transaction volume.

The Way to Integration

The easiest way to achieve the integration objectives and standards we are discussing is to find an ERP system with an inventory management module that meets your needs. If this is not feasible, the solution is to find an ERP system and software designed from an open and flexible API.

If your system has an open API that meets your needs, you can still integrate your system, but this integration may not be in real-time and will require ongoing maintenance as your system provider updates your solution. While manual updating and coordination between systems can keep multiple systems in sync, you may not be able to operate in the long term in today's fast-changing, low-margin business environment.

What to Look for in Inventory Management Program

As a small business owner, it is your job to reduce the possibility of mistakes. Manual tracking using the clipboard and Excel paper or worksheets leaves room for human error, which can result in loss of inventory and profits. A management program is an integral part of your day-to-day operations. Fortunately, you do not have to. During your search for the best management program, you need to find 7 basic elements.

Cost

With the introduction of cloud-based program solutions, it is more affordable for small businesses to implement management program than ever before. While it may be tempting to go out and buy a sophisticated solution, please think of my friend. By paying for some features that you may not need, you will cause great harm to yourself.

Therefore, before considering the cost, you must consider what you need. Look at your business plan and current model and ask yourself the following: What kind of problem does the program solve? What is the difficulty of your current process? How does the program support the efficient operation of your business? The answers to these questions will help provide the necessary resources.

Because functions and functions are closely related to costs, it is very important to understand the needs of the business. For example, if you need a simple program that can track product inventory levels and the costs of selling products, you only have to spend a few dollars per day. When advanced functions such as supply chain management and warehouse management are required, costs of several hundred dollars per month are required.

Easy to Use

Although costs play an important role, the availability of program is also the same. Consider your technical proficiency and the position of your team on the technical scale. If you want your team to learn basic operating procedures and inventory control for hours, it may not be worth your time. Think about it. Whenever you hire a new employee, you will have to spend hours training each of them.

As an owner, you may need to consider a more user friendly solution if you find order data on the system backend or reorder triggers to manage order fulfillment. If you do not know how to drive the shifter, would you buy a car with a manual transmission? It can not be. But if you do, you should spend time learning.

The same goes for a management program. If you and your employees' learning curve are too high, it will take a lot of time, energy and money in the long run and could hurt your business.

Choose a Trusted Provider

We know that inventory system program is a key to your successful business development. And there are a lot of ready programs on the market. So, as a start we recommend to check the existing solutions. And only if you can not accept one from out-of-the-box systems, move to the choosing of bespoke one.

At this stage, you need to check the developer’s proficiency. In most cases, you will not be the first customer,so, do not be afraid to ask for references. Talk to other SME owners to find out what they think of the solution.

You can also view popular review sites, such as Trustpilot, one of the largest online commenting communities in the world. They are dedicated to providing real evaluations of the company to customers who buy products or services from them. 85% of consumers rely on online reviews and personal recommendations.

Reporting and Analysis

Now the data is a hot topic. The recent data scandal on Facebook is obvious and it is undeniable that data play an important role in understanding business performance and customer habits.

In addition to collecting data, inventory management solutions need to present this information to the organized user. If you have to ignore this data to find out what that means, what is the meaning of the data?

Most management programs have predefined reports that provide the necessary key metrics. Other companies can go further and detail and customize the report to show unique information essential to the business.

Depending on your industry, you may need inventory management program that can partially or fully automate the order for new supplies. At a minimum, there are notifications or reports that can help you understand which items are missing.

Integration

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This is a big problem that not only considers the present but also considers the future. You may be using various tools or program applications to run your business. In fact, a survey by Intuit (QuickBooks) found that 68 percent of small businesses use an average of four applications to solve day-to-day problems and improve the efficiency of their business. You can save more time if one or more applications can "talk" to another application through integration.

Because inventory management is closely linked to other business areas, it is a good starting point for observing the integration of other systems with the program.

This integration may not be necessary at this time, but as the company grows, we must make sure these options are available. For a general integration to consider.

E-commerce. If you decide to sell your products online, you will need to use an online management system to track your digital inventory. The ideal is to consolidate the physical and digital worlds to track sales, inventory levels and orders between your site and the program.
Shipping. If your online sales are taking off and you are expanding to online markets such as Amazon or eBay, shipping applications such as ShipStation will have a huge amount of time. By presetting and automating rules, you can automate almost every step of the upload process.
Accounting. 46% of small entrepreneurs do not have a positive balance between work and life, they believe that administrative work, such as bookkeeping, is one of the main obstacles to achieving balance. Why spend hours processing spreadsheets and accounting details to automate the process?

Various Locations

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Inventory management is difficult. It will be difficult when you have some stores. If you have several stores or plan to open a new store, you need a centralized tool for inventory control. Make sure the investment solution supports companies that can expand.

Support and Training

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Some business owners overlook the importance of obtaining high quality customer service. Once you buy a new program, the last thing you want to do is eliminate it in the cold and understand how to use it. Doing As long as you do not have sufficient confidence in your skills, make sure that the program provider offers 24 hours a day, 365 days of training and support.

No one has ever said that finding the best inventory management program for your business is an easy task. However, now that you understand what features you need to look for during the research process, you may be more prepared to development of your own inventory system program and the whole process will spread more efficiently. If you need professional advice or support, get in touch.