Stocktaking is the process of checking and recording your inventory. It plays a major part in your business’ workflow as the insights you gain from it allow you to make sound business decisions in terms of purchasing, production, and sales.
If you’re a manufacturer, stocktake reports tell you when to purchase the goods needed to make your products. Similarly, retail business owners can use the stocktake records to identify dead stock and stockouts, resulting in bigger revenue.
Businesses that sell consumable goods like restaurants and pharmacies also need to do regular stock control to avoid spoilage. By throwing away almost expired goods, it will be easier for you to ensure consumers’ safety and maintain your inventory’s health.
Besides helping you discover stock issues, a stocktake also ensures that your business meets its targets. For example, as you identify that some stocks are about to expire, you can reduce their prices to avoid revenue loss.
In short, any business owner with an inventory should conduct stocktaking periodically for optimal business performance.
How to do a stocktake?
To ensure accurate results and get the full benefit of stocktaking, you need to conduct it properly. Each business generally has its own procedure and stocktaking habits. However, we can boil them down into the following steps.
- Decide how often you want to conduct stocktaking.
The process usually takes an entire day and lots of manpower to complete. Since it’s time and energy-consuming, you’d want to be strategic with the interval. If your products have an expiry date, you should do it continuously (monthly, weekly, or even daily). Otherwise, having it done annually or every half-year should suffice.
- Appraise your inventory
This step involves checking the products’ expiry date and their condition. Make sure to separate the ones you can still sell or use from those about to expire or damaged.
- Document your stocktake records
Count all the goods that are currently in your possession. This includes safety stock, cycle stock, and unfinished products.
- Validate your stocktake
Cross-checking the records from the last stocktake with the most recent one can help you uncover stock discrepancies, which often cause revenue loss. Try to identify the cause and prevent it from happening again.
- Update your stocktake records
Make sure to store them in a safe place as you will use them again on the next stocktake cycle.
Is there a stock and inventory app?
If the process above sounds complicated and tiresome, we have good news for you. AdvStock Inventories offers a self-service stock and inventory app to the retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and hospitality industries using the latest cutting-edge technology. As each business has its own stocktaking needs, we help you design and implement a custom stocktaking solution that suits your business.
Our retail inventory software is available in iOS and Android versions. You can leverage your own mobile phone to stocktake, saving time and money. All you need to do is download our small business stocktaking app on your smartphone, register for an account, upload your data to the retail inventory software, and start stocktaking. It is completely user-friendly and easy to use.
To cater to different types of businesses, we design a small business stocktaking app for some of the most popular industries. Use our stocktaking apps for convenience stores if you’re running a retail business or opt for our stocktaking apps for food and beverage if you own a restaurant. We also offer stocktaking apps for pharmacies as well as stocktaking apps for bars and clubs.
Visit https://advstock.com.au/ to find out more about our stocktaking products and services. Trust us to make your stocktaking routine hassle-free.
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