Inventory management enables retail owners to account for all the stocks going in and out of the store. The process helps retail establishments avoid having neither a surplus nor a deficiency of stock. Consequently, stores effectively sell off their inventory and keep customers happy.
Manually managing inventory involves a number of tedious activities. Keeping tabs on stock quantity changes, preparing inventory reports, and categorizing stock are cumbersome tasks. But not with a POS solution that has inventory automation features.
Automating inventory management is integral to beating the competition in today’s retail industry. By letting a capable inventory software application handle inventory, you can focus on improving retail operations.
In this article, we take a look at five inventory automation features to look for in your Point of Sale software. Let’s get started.
Must-have automation features
Real-time stock updates
Inventory stocks are dynamic. There are new additions to the inventory, and there are items that leave it. Tracking stock movements gives you a grip on controlling inventory.
Manually changing stock numbers is a daunting process. Besides being time-consuming, it opens up a lot of room for human-made errors. You can tackle those problems by ensuring that your software system can update stocks in real-time automatically.
Having this feature lets you free up your employees. Because the software autonomously updates stock quantity in the inventory after every new sale or purchase. As a result, you can redirect employees in charge of monitoring inventory stock to other higher-value tasks.
Automatic re-purchase of stock
Running out of stock is disastrous. It creates a barrier to fulfilling customer orders. That eventually hampers customer satisfaction and negatively impacts business credibility in the long run. An effective way of preventing this scenario is to learn about fast-depleting or low stocks as and when they happen.
Manning personnel to keep watch on stock levels is exhausting. Instead, ensure your Point of Sale software application supports notifications and automatic stock re-purchase.
The notifications system sends alerts about stocks running out fast and low items via SMS, email, and in-app notifications.
The automatic stock re-purchase feature sends out purchase forms when stocks run low autonomously.
SKU generation
Product categorization can be a complex task, especially when you have the same items of different varieties. To elaborate, you may have similar product types but of different colors, sizes, and other attributes. Categorizing such products can save time during inventory management and accounting.
Look for an SKU generation tool in your retail inventory management software for automating product categorization. It lets you enter a product’s attributes into the module, after which it generates an SKU along with a barcode. By labeling your products with these tags, you can use a barcode scanner to read them instantly.
Integration
Customer Management Systems (CMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software applications are some other integral programs retail stores use. Switching between these and your inventory software can cost you time, even more so when you need to shift data from one software to another frequently.
Integration capabilities in inventory management systems eliminate data transfer bottlenecks. By integrating your inventory software with CMS and ERPs, you can access all your business data from a single software application.
Analytics
Logging all the various inventory management processes your store carries out daily is integral. It holds insights into the health of your inventory and much more. To extract those insights, you will need to consolidate inventory data and process them. Manually doing that takes a lot of time.
Alternatively, you can use a POS software system that produces analytics autonomously. The software gathers large volumes of data and extrapolates it into meaningful analytics. They reveal what products are fast-selling and what products have low demand. Furthermore, the analytics forecasts future inventory demand.
Wrapping up
Effective inventory management minimizes wastage of stock and procurement of redundant stock. It maximizes sales, satisfies the needs of customers, and boosts retail profits. You can get the best inventory automation features in SmartPOS.
SmartPOS is a top-of-the-line POS system that minimizes workloads and eliminates errors with its automation-enabled inventory management features. Additionally, SmartPOS has powerful tools to manage customers, sales, employees, and suppliers.
Reach out to us to learn more about SmartPOS.