The Fear of Messing Up (FOMU) and inventory management

Making a mistake while stock-taking, counting, or order packing may seem like no big deal to a warehouse worker. But any small business owner knows that in today’s highly competitive business environment the stakes are high. As a result, managers put extra pressure on warehouse personnel to try and avoid making mistakes altogether. Instead, they could overcome FOMU (Fear of Messing Up) by making their inventory management more error-resistant and flexible to swiftly fix those blunders. Here’s how.

The FOMU can be overcome in 3 steps

Messing things up at one step could have a domino effect and cause you to have trouble making inventory records add up, getting to the bottom of problems, or, ultimately, losing clients to your own errors. Meanwhile, making mistakes is human nature. There is something you can do in order to get a better handle on that.

A lot of errors-to-be are nesting in your QuickBooks Item list right now. There might be duplicates, products that you’ve stopped selling long ago or those that your supplier has discontinued. You know better than to just let all of this be, so you might want to review the list of products and services first to ensure it’s up-to-date. 

To be honest, it’s not exactly a quick and enjoyable process as you’ll have to go and review them one by one in QuickBooks (applies to both Desktop and Online) manually. To go faster, you can use the filtering, set up a date range or go category by category. Deleting these items can mess up your books as they used to be associated with transactions, so you might want to simply make them inactive. 

2. Find a 3rd party inventory control app that can sync back to QuickBooks

Quickbooks, more often than not, doesn’t cope with the task of managing inventory in a way that is quick, intuitive, accurate, and informative. And it wasn’t designed to do any of this. Third-party inventory apps let you bring order, automation, efficiency, and data-driven decision-making into daily operations without losing the link to QuickBooks. Above all, they are meant to reduce error at all steps. QuickBooks has a 3rd-party app store with real-user reviews to help you look for the one that suits you best. 

3.Enable barcoding throughout inventory, purchasing, and sales processes

Despite the era of high-tech, a lot of small businesses seem to be struggling to get into the 21st century. The speed and accuracy of barcoding technologies is something they are still missing out on. Barcoding is available in QuickBooks Desktop with Advanced Inventory but QuickBooks Online doesn’t have it. That’s where 3rd-party inventory apps step in to fill the gap. To exemplify, HandiFox allows reading, recording, and generating barcodes. It also helps create barcode labels to put on products for a more efficient search and quicker entry on transactions.

7 things that make inventory management error-resistant in HandiFox

Here is a list of preventive mechanisms we’ve built into HandiFox to bust errors:

• Barcoded inventory
  
• Automatic syncing with QuickBooks
  
• Not being able to create transactions with items that aren’t available
  
• Transactions with insufficient items quantity or wrong lot numbers get blocked
  
• Ability to review inventory counts before applying them
  
• Checking incoming stock against PO‘s
  
• Pick/pack verification of outgoing stock

Mistakes, however small, can spiral into bigger problems making you spend hours reconciling inventory records to right the wrong. Enjoy error-resistant inventory control with HandiFox -  take a free trial now.