Types of Inventory Management Systems

Are you thinking of organizing your business and adding a pro aspect of electronic or online management into it? Do you find it difficult to manually manage the inflow and outflow of resources and physical components of the business into that old ragged diary of yours? Is your business suffering from problems such as deadstock, high taxes, storage costs, and spoilage and space problems? All what you need is a good “Inventory Management” system.

Inventory management for a successful business is needed for at different levels and at almost all the branches of the business. Taking the example of a restaurant, inventory is required at different stages, starting from the purchase of raw material i.e. the cooking ingredients followed by the inventory of raw material used for various dishes to determine the usage of the raw material. Then we will require an inventory of the dishes made each day to determine the selling streak of each dish. Furthermore, if the restaurant has ventured into online delivery then the inventory of packing material used and required is also to be made. 

Therefore inventory management software is the most efficient way to organize and regulate business in a modern era of immense competition. In the above example of a restaurant, we could see how inventory management can help to determine the capital invested in a particular product or range of products and then to determine what profit we made with the products sold. Same can be the case with any other business relating to shoes, books, steel, clothes or any other commodity. INNOVENTRY adds up these features of inventory management and billing procedures to give your business the tools for deciding amazing business ideas and adding clients to your business with no discrepancy such as billing errors from your side.

We at INNOVENTRY provide you with solutions to your varied problems from billing issues to inventory management and updating. But before venturing into this amazing gift of technology to modern-day business let us first understand the types of inventory management systems which can really make your business stand out from other contemporary businesses following almost the same business model or any other business as a matter of fact.  

1) Raw Materials

Every business starts with raw materials; they are the base of any business. They consist of the materials your business uses to produce its own goods.

Inventory of raw materials is important as firstly, it gives you the description and idea about the raw materials present to forecast your production of finished products and secondly, you can manage and determine the capital invested. 

2) Work-In-Progress

Inventory of work in progress materials consists of the items from your raw materials that are put into the process of manufacturing them into the final furnished products. WIP inventory consists of 

• Necessary materials
• Parts (components)
• Assemblies
• Subassemblies

3) Finished Goods

Then after production is complete you would require an inventory of the products post production and ready to be marketed sold to your valued customers. For example if your factory produces waffles, the packets of finished waffles is considered as the finished good. 

4) Packing Materials

Most businesses need to pack a ship their finished products as seen in the above example that the restaurant for deliveries needs packing material. 

Although packing materials might not seem like a significant expense. But your business does use a large amount of these supplies every day. If you don’t keep tight control of this inventory, the cost will quickly add up.

5) Safety Stock

Safety stock is the amount of product you keep on hand that exceeds what your business needs to satisfy regular demand. With good monitoring, tracking, and control, you can allocate certain types of inventory to protect against supply-and-demand uncertainties, low delivery reliability, and poor-quality components. This type of inventory cushion is called safety stock (or buffer inventory).

6) MRO Goods

MRO stands for Maintenance, repair, and operating supplies goods—these are items put in place to maintain tasks in the production process. These contribute to be one of the major components in the production process although they are not directly a part of the finished product.

MRO goods depend upon the type of business you do. For examples MRO goods for factories include gloves, safety gear, machine spares etc. and for shops include packing materials, binding material etc. Even office supplies like staples, pens and pencils, copier paper, and toner—all of the little parts that keep the wheels turning—are considered MRO goods inventory.

7) Services

Crucial to business success, service inventory includes the monitoring and management of all other types of inventory in the production process. 

The principal product of many businesses is not always materialistic but there are businesses where the principal product they offer are the services they offer. For example, some businesses give services like housekeeping, marketing, recruitment etc. They too need to keep account of the services they provide.  

Also, businesses like insurance companies and automobile or appliance servicing companies need to be on their toes with their schedules and services they have to provide, service inventory helps in them.

Your business will be able to rest assured knowing the production process is on a continuum and that your employees will always be on hand when needed. Now that’s what you call service inventory!

8) Transportation

If your business is about the transport sector then this kind of inventory is for you. If your business involves transporting goods and materials from one location to other, this kind of inventory is a must for you. Merchandise shipped by truck or rail can sometimes take days (or even weeks) to go from a regional warehouse to your retail facility.

Inventory in transit must be accounted for when it comes to supply and demand, along with the timelines for those demands to be met.

If you are into any business then you need an effective inventory management system and INNOVENTORY can help innovate your inventory maintenance procedure in the most optimum manner. 

Features of Inventory Management Software

Running a business, a factory or an industry? What bothers you the most? Sales and Profit. But it is impossible to obtain the level of sales that you aim for until you concentrate on managing your own product, the raw materials and the processing material such as spare parts of those machines which are required to create those awesome products of yours. “A place for everything and everything in its place,” goes the saying. Let’s add to that a label for everything and the means to track it all. And, how about some alerts when there’s too much of one item and a shortage of another? This mix pretty much sums up what inventory management software can do for your business.

Whether you are running a shoe store, grocery store, a multipurpose mart, e-commerce site, a logistics company or any business you name it, an inventory management system is must-have if you want an easy-going business where you can only concentrate on customer addition and sales improvement to enhance your ultimate goal that is profit. It will give you insights into every aspect of your products, and in some cases, will help you better understand your customers too.

What is an inventory management system? An inventory management system is basically a tool that allows you to track goods across your business’s supply chain. It largely optimizes the entire process from order placement with your vendor to order delivery to your customer, mapping the complete journey of a product.

Moreover, with features that an inventory management software provides a business can come out to be miraculously profitable, it provides transparency to cash flow and the input as well as the output which in-turn has a big impact on the bottom line of business. Inventory management software enables accurate tracking of goods; businesses can minimize waste, analyze trends, and make better investment decisions.

There is a range of features of inventory management software provides which help you manage your worthy business. To choose an inventory management software following are some features to look up to,

1) BILLING AND INVOICE MANAGEMENT

In this era of fast-paced business, inventory management software will provide you with super easy billing procedures. Added features such as customization and professional printing as well as sharing using e-mails as well as other means features should be present in the software. Also added logos of the business, signatures and proper placement of advertisements on the bill will even make the business impactful.   Great inventory management software creates great user-oriented billing software which can make your business look very professional. This creates a professional image in the mind of the clients and leads to added buyers or clients. Duplicate invoices can also be created in the format of previous invoices.

2) BARCODE SCANING AND CREATION

Inventory management software have a feature which enables them to create barcodes for your unique products which can be used directly on to the billing and invoice creations for faster billings. Also, barcodes can be used for online verification and authentication of your product. Unique Bar Code for the product specifying its quantity and rate can be created. Bar codes can also be generated at once for all the items in the purchase form by providing requisite information of the products. This reduces the billing time for the commodities and considerably increases the efficiency of sales, in turn, increasing profitability and revenue.

3) QUOTATION MANAGEMENT

Every business requires purchasing; it is basically the backbone of any business as raw materials and processing materials are required to create a furnished product. Inventory management software provide your business with professional quotations which can be generated in a blink of the eye with just one click. With it, you can request quotations from vendors and generate purchase order which can help a business to manage and keep a digital check of its expenditure.

4) MARKETING AND NOTIFICATION FEATURES

Marketing is one of the most important components of a successful business.  Inventory management software provides users marketing facilities such as SMS notifications and payment reminders to its customers including promotional messages which can provide full-fledged exposure and dedicated customer targeting. Businesses can send automatic SMS invoices notifications to their customers which can save both time and money.

5) STOCK NOTIFICATIONS

Receive alerts and notifications when there’s over- or under-stocking beyond a defined threshold. This helps you to place orders or offer promotional discounts to clear out extra stock.

6) ORDER MANAGEMENT

Most vendors offer an inventory management system that can help you manage your sales orders. These tools allow users to customize pricing, send quotes, track orders and manage returns. Some advanced systems sync orders with inventory levels, mark items for shipment, support multichannel sales and make auto-adjustments to maintain profitability. Order management is an essential feature for increasing and maintaining customer satisfaction using order tracking, sales order, quotations, order editing.

7) REPORTS AND ANALYTICS

Analytics informs you of when demand may be higher than expected, like during certain holidays. Use this data to prevent stock outages, which could result in a missed opportunity to grow your business. Reporting provides this data in ways that are easy to understand and share. These might include specialized PDFs or inbuilt dashboards. You might have the best insights in the company, but without an effective way to share them, they won’t be much use to you. Many tools allow users to also drill down a report to find the level of information necessary for their function.

8) MOBILE SUPPORT

This aspect affects what hardware you’ll be managing your processes on and if you’ll be able to do it remotely. Many systems offer a mobile website, which enables users to access the system from any desktop. If you utilize tablets, phones or other mobile devices, check to see if a vendor offers a native application. Mobile support is often OS-specific, so it’s important to keep that in mind as well. While most vendors try to support all popular platforms, it’s not a universal concern. So it’s always important that the inventory app you invest in can run on your existing hardware.

9) MATERIAL GROUPING

Group inventory into predefined categories and ensure you’re always updated about quantities of components and specifications that make up your product stock, and manage their reordering schedules as required.

10) INVENTORY OPTIMIZATION

Maintain just the right amount of inventory for each product, without over- or under-stocking any item. It’s especially useful if you deal with products that experience a seasonal rise and fall in demand.

10 Reasons why you need Business Accounting Software

Do you own a business of your own?

If yes, then chances are that you always look to create your business more efficient in terms of management of money and material. Well in today’s fast-paced business world technology can prove to be a great aid to your business issues.

Smart phones, social media and computers are already in wide usage. It’s time to take these technological gifts to the next level and incorporate it into your accounting and finances.

Billing and Accounting software programs are computer-based tools that have greatly worked to eradicate the primitive method of traditional bookkeeping used to handle accounting they also aid in storing your organization’s financial data and performing business transactions. As it is correctly said time is money, these accounting softwares can help a businessman save a lot of time by taking over the manual tiresome accounting jobs to quick and accurate accounting miracles. Hence time is saved and so is the money. It eliminates redundant data entry such as filling in your customer’s information on the quote, processing the work order, and then completing the invoice. Developing businesses with more employees, customers, and inventory handled can largely benefit from this system.

Accounting technology can help businesses manage cash flow and even help small businesses to analyze the accounts and convert to developing and eventually the big players of their respective segments. You need to find the best accounting software essential for you to run a better business. Want to know why?

Stay tuned in this article. You’re about to find out how computerized accounting softwares can help you in your business and help you achieve better than you expect.

There is a steady growth in the market of accounting system over the past years as more businesses are realizing its advantages. Increment has kept its aura while more and more organizations are switching to an accounting solution to handle their financials; these facts are enough to prove the importance of these softwares in this cut throat era of competition. If you’re considering implementing this system to your business, one of the primary aspects to look into is determining the ways it can help with your accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Here’s the summary of why accounting software is useful for business of any size.

1. Automation of Processes

Manual bookkeeping often involves data redundancy and involves doing the same tasks over and over again making the process very tiresome. Automation has helped in tackling with this major issue faced by businesses and manual bookkeeping has become absolutely obsolete. Complex calculations can be performed in the blink of an eye which earlier took few hours to complete. Invoices can also be processed automatically without any need for you or your staff to ever get involved. You won’t need to spend any more time on creating receipts, credit notes or manual invoices.

2. Increased Speed

Need an analysis report generated? It can happen in a few clicks instead of waiting hours or days. Statements can also be produced quickly. You can get a picture of what’s happening in your company in a matter of seconds. The peculiarities of business such as accounting, taxes and payroll can be very time consuming and complex process, but accounting softwares can help businesses with faster processes. Less time spent on these leads to more time in marketing and adding clients. Computerized accounting takes the normally tedious task of planning your accounting and makes it faster.

3. Up To Date Info

With new taxation systems and other laws and accountancy updates it is very difficult to perform calculations manually hence accountants themselves are raving about the advantages of real-time data. Automatic software updates can keep the business up to date and can help to avoid any sort of legal or financial discrepancy and save the business a hell lot of extra work. Also smart entrepreneurs can only analyze and use the data if they have the latest information available.

4. Visuals

Better visual aids are provided by these computer accounting systems in the form of pie charts, bar graphs and other visual analysis toots which are otherwise not possible in manual bookkeeping and accounting. They also make it easier to share information in a more digestible visual format. There are a number of different ways you can generate your accounts.

5. Computerized Accounting Systems Are Cost-effective

Computerized softwares aid in cost cutting by decreasing the amount of work force the business needs hence in turn cutting down on expenditure on the employees the business possesses. You save double, firstly on resources and secondly on hiring an accountant. Work will be done faster and more efficiently using software instead of people. Simple, routine accounting tasks can be done using technology, freeing up your staff’s time.

6. Better Security

Accounts information can be stored in cloud based softwares remotely and securely to prevent stealing of data and ideas by other contemporaries which are looking up to your business model. Securing your small business’ valuable data is a huge priority. Also storage space is saved by preventing those large bulky files. If the unexpected happens, cloud-based computerized accounting allows your records to be opened up on a new computer.

7. Increased Accuracy

Computers are known to be accurate, the factor of human error is greatly reduced by the use of these computer based softwares and also, even the best accountant is prone to make an error. Mistakes are unavoidable. This includes things like entering income and expenses, period end adjustments and taxes can be calculated with full accuracy and accounts are error free. No more transactions slipping through the cracks. If you want accurate, reliable tracking, reconciliation and management, it’s time to switch to accounting software.

8. Scalability

This means looking to see that the software can handle extra accounts, business units, or inventory units. Depending on your business type, it may also need to have the capability to work with third-party software. This feature enables your business to grow without any boundaries and limits, without the fear of any complexities arising from the growing scale of your businesses. The whole idea of this feature is that the software develops with the business.

9. Access

If you own a business with multi store and multi layer management then it is absolutely necessary for various levels to be given the access to the requisite information at their level for optimum functioning of the business. Also the process of merging or issuing stocks becomes a cake walk. Hiding sensitive information of management level from the operational level will be a great feature of such computer based softwares.

10. Business Expansion

The time one saves in complex accounting can help the business to venture into more and more business opportunities leading to even better profits and sales. Also the time left can help create better marketing strategies and high expansion of market for the business. This in turn reduces the risk factor by decreasing over dependence on a single business model.

Innoventry is the best GST Ready Accounting software for small and medium businesses in India. Innoventry - A complete inventory & accounting business solution - GST Ready. Switch to Smart Billing Software. Get Started Today! You can contact us at support@innoventry.in or visit us at www.innoventry.in you can also call us at 9284008573