Inventory reports are a crucial aspect of your business. Yet, many small businesses don’t track inventory enough, leading to non-existent or manual inventory management.
When you generate relevant, accurate and up-to-date inventory reports, you get access to a wealth of knowledge about your business’s most important and expensive assets. After all, without your inventory, you have nothing to sell. With these reports (and a little bit of analysis), you can observe trends, strengths and weaknesses, and gaps in your inventory management.
Therefore, to get a better understanding of how to optimise your inventory management, and ultimately grow, you need to utilise these five inventory reports in your business.
1. Inventory Chart
Businesses, even small ones, can generate quite a few data and inventory reports. Hence, the first step to understanding your inventory is to view your stock charts. As a visual presentation of your product sales and performance, you can readily have quick access to crucial information on your POS backend. With one glance, get an overview of your top performing products and total quantity of products sold during a specific time range. For those busy business owners, this type of inventory report, the Stock Chart, is a quick and easy way to get a summary of your business’s performance over a particular period of time.
2. Inventory Balance Report
How often do you run into situations where you need to tell a customer that the item they are looking for is out-of-stock? All too frequently, businesses lose out on revenue due to stockouts or out-of-stock situations. When this happens, not only do customers leave dissatisfied, they also leave less confident in your business. That’s where having a good inventory report can come in handy!
Inventory balance reports let you monitor product stock levels and stock values from all of your outlets. Then if your POS has the ability, you can also set reorder points and maximum stocks. Later, when your stock levels drop below the reorder point, the POS system can either send replenishment alerts or automatically replenish your product inventory. That way, you have a buffer in place to protect your revenue, and your bottom line can stay where you want it to be.
Read about more ways you can prevent stockouts in this article: How To Prevent Stockouts.
3. Inventory Movement Report
Knowing how much inventory you have is one thing, but it’s not enough for a good inventory management system. In order to have better stock control, you need to know what exactly happens to your inventory. Hence, Inventory Movement Reports allow you to track inventory changes and movement, such as sales, transfers and returns. Thereafter, you can observe the flow of your inventory and analyse what could cause any fluctuations.
4. Daily Inventory Movement Report
Tracking your performance through inventory reports on a daily basis is essential for business growth. In essence, the Daily Inventory Movement Report does the same as the Inventory Movement Report, but conveniently tracks all stock changes for that particular day. There are a few differences, though. You will also be able to view information about your initial and final stock counts for the day, total sales of each product and the carrying cost of each product.
5. Inventory Sales Report
How does your business perform? How well are your products selling? Are you stocking the right amount of inventory for your sales numbers?
In order to completely understand how your business is doing, and determine how to better manage your inventory, you need to know your top-sellers, your worst sellers and year-over-year growth. With that information, you can then manage your inventory and supply chain to optimise your business.
Here’s where an Inventory Sales Report can come in useful. This inventory report gives you a review of your total sales broken down to each product across all of your outlets, as long as those sales were recorded on your POS systems. Filter your results by date and time range, product name, categories, outlet and even suppliers, to view a fully accurate depiction of your stock sales. You can also opt to generate a Category Sales Report to view your total sales breakdown by product category.
Conclusion
With proper inventory management and stock control, your business’s production needs can be identified and predicted. Hence, you’ll optimise your inventory so nothing goes to waste, save costs, and increase revenue streams by not losing out in out-of-stock situations. Learn how else you can use proper inventory management to reduce costs!
However, manually tracking inventory can be tedious, inefficiency and risks inaccuracy due to human error. To mitigate this, you should invest in a proper automated inventory management system that can save you time, energy and resources. Plus, you’ll be able to readily access any inventory report as you need with a simple POS system. EPOS’ robust inventory management system lets you update your stock count, avoid stockouts, generate purchase orders, and more!
• Written by Adrija Chakravarti
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