The importance of inventory counting and how to make it a whole lot easier

At HandiFox, we take our time to analyze and share with you the best practices for your business –so, this blog centers around the importance of inventory counting and how to make it as painless as possible.

Why you should keep stock counts accurate

Keeping your inventory counts accurate is absolutely essential to the health and profitability of your business for a number of reasons:

• Knowing you current inventory levels is key to coping with over- and understocking and tackling these issues promptly.
• Tracking demand and seasonal trends gives your business foresight and lets it respond to customer needs much faster
• Keeping a close eye on your inventory helps put an end to shrinkage, theft and non-theft losses.
• Most importantly, you need to know the value of your inventory to provide your accountant with a solid record of it, as well as for better budget planning.

How to properly do inventory counting

It goes without saying that an accurate physical inventory count takes a great deal of effort and time.
It usually starts with identifying:

• what is going to be counted. Raw goods, finished products and so forth
• where a physical inventory count should be performed. That would be the main warehouse, remote or mobile locations (trucks). You might have some items on order, shipped or coming in. The spread of the goods makes the job of inventory counting particularly difficult.

What’s left to do is to settle on when and how to do that.

• You might want to notify external storage locations,
• Freeze warehouse activities,
• Complete data entry on the remaining transactions
• Count inventory using count tags
• Verify tags
• Enter the information right away and do the final tally by putting all numbers together

That is, perhaps, the shortest rundown of the process. Given data entry and the final tally are done manually and eventually you have to deal with the inventory counting report in the form of a huge spreadsheet, inventory counting can be a real pain in the neck!

How you can get rid of inventory counting headaches

If you want to have a trusted picture of your current inventory levels and accounting, but you definitely don’t want inventory counting to steal that much time from you, it’s time you settled for an automated inventory management system, like HandiFox. By making a clean break from Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry you will reduce human errors, maximize your employees’ time and, surely, make the task of inventory counting much less exasperating and time-consuming.

Once you have scanned all the information from barcodes into HandiFox and further into QuickBooks, you can really keep track of what you have and have a better vision of what you want to do with it.

To learn more about how inventory counting can be done with HandiFox, please check out How to speed up inventory counting with HandiFox inventory software.