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.