POS WITH INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Avoiding common small business inventory issues with modern point of sale technology
For many business owners, inventory management is one of the most tedious aspects of running a business. It’s mundane and granular. Moreso, there have been few, if any, practical solutions to make inventory management easier until recent years. This has meant that inventory management has historically been done by hand, which results both in low morale, human errors, and a compromised bottom line.
Inventory management is also one of the most important aspects of your business to have locked down. Poorly managed inventory can result in:
#1
Having too much or too little of a particular item or ingredient
#2
Not being prepared for events or running specials
#3
Missing the deadline for a reorder when necessary
#4
Wasting valuable employee time that could be spent helping your customers
The good news is that there are modern solutions to the inventory management problem. Here’s a breakdown of how a point of sale (POS) system with inventory management can help your business.
Point of sale driven inventory software
You know that you need a solution for your inventory management issues, but you aren’t sure where to start. Here are a few of the most common and specialized features included with today’s modern POS systems that can improve your inventory management.
To address this discrepancy, your customer experience strategy needs to be an integral part of your operations. And, when necessary, you must adapt your tactics based on customer interactions and feedback.
The results of bad customer experiences
These days, customers are more informed than ever before and they can find what they want with just a few taps of their smartphone.
With so many brands competing for attention, customers have higher expectations and a lower tolerance than ever before for bad experiences, and this shows in the statistics:
The first, and arguably most important, feature of a POS with inventory management is the movement online. Cloud-based data storage protects your data even in the event of an outage and automatically refreshes as soon as you are back online, making sure that your daily operations don’t skip a beat
Cloud-based POS systems offer metrics on everything from sales, registers, employee performance, and item popularity. With these metrics, you can keep close tabs on what items are over/underperforming and make sure that orders for refills are made on time or held off until needed.
This keeps your small business running smoothly and ensures that your inventory is kept well stocked and properly balanced.
Metrics on what you have are essential, but metrics on what you need will take your business to the next level. Use predictive analytics to keep tabs on holidays, specials and changes in the market. This allows you to plan your inventory management strategy weeks or even months ahead, placing orders in advance of your competitors.
This ensures that you will always be prepared for upcoming events and will never find yourself wanting for items that you should have ordered weeks in advance.
With these tools, you can keep close tabs on your inventory—what works and what doesn’t and what may need extra attention. This data stream takes into account upcoming seasonal events and market trends to make sure you are never caught off guard.
Finally, taking your inventory management to the cloud ensures that the data you’ve worked hard to accumulate will never be lost or compromised.
Managing multiple locations
When your sales are up enough that you’re able to start making plans to expand into new locations you normally would need to follow these steps:
These steps are typically arduous, forcing you to dig through systems to make sure that everything is being kept in proper order. Using a POS with inventory management, however, automatically streamlines your system from the jump. This prepares you for your move to alternate locations and makes growing your business easier than ever. Here are some of the benefits of branching out your POS:
Multiple sales data points
One of the most challenging aspects of managing multiple locations is comparing the profit margins of your separate locations. While one location might be doing very well, it stands to reason that others might not. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including:
– Different customer demographics
– Temporary spikes in sales that confuse sales data
Whatever the reasons, it’s important to have a POS that accommodates these potential issues in your sales data points. This gives you a holistic view of your company’s profit margins and helps you make critical decisions about where to go next.
Multiple inventories
Once you have comprehensive data on the sales reports from your multiple locations, you can start making decisions about what to do with your inventory. Normally this would have to be done by coordinating between different offices, each of which uses its own POS.
Modern POS systems, however, offer small business owners the ability to coordinate their stocks in a single package from any location.
Multiple staffs
Modern POS options also help you monitor your staff. This is especially important when you are managing multiple locations, each of which has its own staff. Comprehensive employee analytics help you keep track of attendance, sales records and other valuable metrics that help you identify which of your staff is performing well and, by contrast, which staff members may need additional training.
Managers in each of your branches can use this information to keep their location contributing to your overall business strategy.
It’s clear, then, that upgrading to a POS with inventory management opens the door to new locations. With the tools in modern POS systems, you can monitor and regulate your inventory whenever necessary. All these abilities are available through a centrally controlled user interface (UI) that makes inventory management easier than it has ever been.
Multi-channel inventory strategy
“Brick and mortar” business models are still important, but the fact is your customers are going to expect you to be able to offer more for their money. Most transactions in the modern market are split between physical locations and online purchases, so your POS system must be designed to keep up with both of those channels. In addition to sales abilities, this also means that your inventory management systems must be able to keep track of what’s coming out of your physical locations as well as your website.
| Par-level inventory |
| Par-level inventory management began in the restaurant industry, but is slowly beginning to take hold in other industries like retail. The practice is a relatively straightforward approach to inventory management—you order enough of a stock to get through a small period of time. Broken down as simply as possible, the par-stock management equation looks like this: |
| Par level = (inventory used each week + safety stock buffer) / number of deliveries |
| Although the approach and equation behind par-stock inventory seem simple, it does require an advanced POS solution to get a better handle on your revenue vs. deliveries per designated time period. When successfully implemented, however, it ensures that you will be able to meet the needs of your customer base more efficiently than ever. |
Prior to POS with inventory management, this was a strenuous process in which managers had to switch between different systems or third-party providers to check their physical stock as opposed to their online inventory. Modern POS systems offer efficient solutions to help you manage all of your inventory channels into a single, streamlined solution.
How to implement an omnichannel strategy with your point of sale
Par-level stock has a lot to offer businesses in every industry, but the implementation process can feel overwhelming. This is largely because, up until recently, that process involved a great deal of work crunching numbers to figure out what the proper goal number to shoot for between delivery times was. This leads to long periods of trial and error followed by incremental adjustments until they finally hit the sweet spot.
The truth is, the math behind par-level inventory management can be difficult, but modern tools can make it easier. Managers looking to implement a strong multi-channel need to ask themselves a few simple questions:
These questions are critical when deciding to implement an omnichannel solution for your business, and the process of actually switching over is easier than you might think. POS with inventory management solutions offers you an intuitive path to move towards customizing your inventory practices to reflect an omnichannel solution.
The benefits of a multi-channel system
Although the most common objection to upgrading to a multichannel approach regards implementation, some have concerns that the rewards of transitioning are minimal at best. They argue that these processes are still achieved through traditional inventory models, so there is little reason to disrupt an operation that works.
No matter how well an operation is currently working, it can still work better. The technological innovations created by transitioning to a POS with inventory management are built in to save your employees time and ensure that your customers are able to purchase without trouble. The benefits of implementing a multi-channel inventory system include:
Data integration
Integrating your data between locations and sales channels
Inventory management
Managing inventory to meet customer expectations
Online reputation
Boosting your online reputation using your website
In short, you’ve worked hard to get your business to where it is. It only makes sense that you make the right decisions to bring it to the next level and that only comes with investing in tools that will get you there. By upgrading your POS, you are giving yourself the tools to make that growth happen by accumulating analytic data, opening your channels and trusting automation to do the work that you no longer need to do.
Optimize multi-store inventory management software with a point of sale provider
Your customers deserve to find their favorite items and to discover new items regardless of the location they visit. The execution of a multi-location inventory strategy is no longer a mystery when a top-notch POS solution is implemented.
Optimizing inventory is a long-standing challenge that demands a high-tech approach. The POS solutions developed by talech do just that; giving small businesses an affordable set of powerful POS tools. We learn from our customers exactly what they desire in a multi-store inventory management software solution. Contact us to learn more about our inventory solutions or to take part in a free demo.
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