The importance of stock control systems

What is a Stock Control System?

Stock Control, also known as Inventory Management, is the process of monitoring and managing inventory levels for the products your company buys and sells or even manufactures depending on your business.

Effectively managing and handling your stock levels is important and should be a high priority for any business. Poor stock management can have dire effects across lots of areas of your business without robust processes in place.

Why is Stock Control Important?

When running a business, cashflow and actual cash are crucial.

Poor stock control can have a detrimental effect on both of these. Too much stock, which you can't sell in a timely fashion, will likely have to be paid for potentially before you can recoup any money from the sale of these goods. Holding more stock than you need can ultimately lead to a requirement for larger warehousing facilities, too.

Equally, not holding enough goods in stock can have a direct impact on your ability to sell your products. Often customers need something by a specific date, and if you cannot fulfil their orders in a timely fashion due to a lack of stock, they will end up buying it from one of your competitors who can meet their needs. And, once your competitor has them as a customer, who are they likely to buy from next time?

Having a stock management system which is integrated with other business processes gives you the information you need across all departments, to better manage customer expectations, and provide more accurate information on delivery lead times. But when this is backed up with solid reporting, you can start to analyse trends in the goods you sell, to better calculate how much stock you should have on hand for any of your given product range.

Especially in more recent times, we have seen customers adopt more of a multi-channel approach to selling their products, perhaps through various online platforms plus direct selling either over the phone or face-to-face. Another advantage of a fully integrated software platform is the fact all of these channels can be aware of live stock level information. This, again, provides a better experience for your customers as they can buy with confidence from you whichever their preferred channel is.

How do you decide how to utilise this?

To better understand whether you should consider a better stock management system, you should ask yourself the following questions. If you answer no; to any of these, it is likely you could make some significant improvements to the way you manage stock.

• Do you have surplus stock in your warehouse which doesn't sell as quick as you'd like?
• Do you take on orders from customers, only to find out you can't fulfil them as quickly as you would like?
• Can your team easily see free stock and stock which is on order with your supply chain at the point of producing a customer quote or processing an order?
• Can stock quickly be allocated to a customer order?
• Can you produce reports by individual product code to understand the volumes sold, broken down to daily levels to help with stock planning?

In both our Business Automation and Service Automation plans, the stock management module is fully integrated with quotations, sales order management, delivery notes and purchase orders, to provide the most highly efficient way to manage your stock in amongst your business processes and across every department in your business.

If you want to find out more about how we help businesses like yours, get in touch and we would be happy to discuss exactly what you want to achieve and show you how with a live software demo. If you think this could be beneficial to you, feel free to come and see the advantages for yourself.

You won't be disappointed.