Optimising your Stocktakes is a key factor in making sure you’re managing your profit margins!

You’re probably wondering if there’s a better way to control your stock taking and counts of your inventory, perhaps different methods & team sizes etc and how to just get more efficient stocktaking. Or maybe you’re wondering how much money you’re losing out on with incorrect stock takes, you will most likely be very surprised!

CNBC published an article back in 2015 that retailers are losing almost $2 trillion due to incorrect stocktakes that cause complex issues such as out-of-stock items, overstocks and returns, this number is only moving higher and higher so this highlights the need for an accurate and efficient stocktaking solution.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/30/retailers-are-losing-nearly-2-trillion-over-this.html

That sure is a lot of money to be lost! a lot of that money should be staying in your business, helping you grow, not halting your development and you finding yourself out of pocket.

Remember, an accurate and proper count of your inventory will also relate to happy customers as stock outages will be avoided – this may then lead to them going elsewhere to find what they’re after, this in-turn means you’re losing customers, trust, revenue and most importantly, losing customers to competitors.

We here at EasyCount have over a decades worth of experience relating to stocktaking so we can help you with managing your stocktakes with these steps;

Have a plan!

Don’t wake up one day and decide “lets do a count of all inventory today”. Firstly start with the question, why do I need a count it? For valuation purposes? for your accountant and financial management reasons? To avoid stock outages? To update your point of sale? To identify stock discrepancies?

Create a plan as to why you need one, how you will undertake it, who will do it, and what will you do with your result. Only you can answer these questions for your own business.

Technology is the way forward

You may still be using pen, paper & Excel, you may have used them for many years and are comfortable in doing so, but don’t you just hate double-entry? And maybe you just want to conduct your stocktakes in-house and not pay for outsourced solutions each time?

Technology is ever growing and more and more business are looking at ways to cater technology to their needs to push themselves up the business ladder and attract more attention. Technology is accurate and easily accessible, it’s constantly changing and looking for new ways to create new solutions to make those mundane tasks much faster.

Instead of using pen, paper & Excel, how about eliminate all those tools are just go for an electronic approach? all your data and counts will be stored in a virtual cloud meaning you can access your stock counts wherever you are, whenever, so long as you have an internet connection you will always be able to keep track of your counts. Most importantly its faster, easier, cheaper and a very secure solution to making sure your data is safe and not on 100’s of pieces of paper with Excel spreadsheets!

If you’re interested in an electronic way to count your stock, head on over to  https://easycount.io/

Physical counting for accurate stocktaking

You may think using technology to count your stock is all you need to do, right? wrong!

Tracking your stock levels by doing a physical count is the most accurate way in making sure your not mismanaging your inventory.

You can have multiple teams count physically for you in larger areas, again this is easily checked, audited and synced with your electronic devices such as EasyCount.

Post Inventory

Now the work really starts for once a count of your inventory is completed, you now need to analyse the results. What are your stock losses? Have you compared scanning margin to your actual margin? Why are these different? Are high value stock lines investigated fully?

In essence, follow the money. Don’t worry too much about missing 2,000 small items at a cost of €0.01 each when you have another piece of equipment at €2,000 which is unaccounted for. Prioritise what is worthy of your time in investigating. A company we worked with recently wanted to priortise their stock control function. Post stocktake, they sorted the results by the largest variance by value, started with discrepancies at over €1,000, once they are rectified, look at over €500. Repeat this process. They now only investigate variance of product of over €50 across thousand of product lines. Most importantly, this must be done IMMEDIATELY after the count of your inventory. Days and weeks later is no good and less likely to yield results.

Final Notes

We hope these small, but helpful tips will encourage you to take accurate stocktakes to ensure your maximizing profits in your business – maybe you wish to stick with pen, paper & Excel although the prospect of going fully digital is something we endorse and that’s why we’re looking to making stocktaking a lot less mundane for future counts.