POS Inventory Management Saves Time, Money, and Reduces Shrink

Retail is a demanding field of service for customers with specific wants and needs. Not meeting those customers’ needs will find them drifting off to competitors. One wants to ensure their shelves and counters are not barren from the stock they should have in place. A retail point of sale inventory management system can greatly assist with this. In addition, it can leave your employees available for servicing customers and keeping their work areas clean.

The basic idea behind point of sale inventory management is for replenishment to occur based off of sales. Different systems operate in different ways depending on how it is set up. Most systems will offer the same basic benefits to the retailer and that is what we will look at.

Reducing Shrink
A high source of shrinkage in retail comes with the loss or misplacement of paperwork. The size of the company will affect how drastically it affects them, thus the range is wide. It can easily range into thousands or millions of dollars for larger companies. Smaller companies will want to be reducing shrinkage just to help shave money off of expenses. A point of sale inventory management system helps to greatly reduce the human interaction factor with the ordering process. This results in less lost paperwork, over ordering, or botched ordering.

Higher Accuracy in Inventory
A point of sale inventory management system takes the guesswork out of ordering and providing stock. The inventory of the store is stored away into a database with all pertinent information tied to it. This includes things like case count size, UPC, SKU, price per unit, and various other bits of information. When a customer purchases an item, the quantity is adjusted in the database. This enables one to use the company computer system to input a UPC number and receive an accurate idea of the number of an item one has left. One may also find it worthwhile to invest in hand-held computer systems which allows scanning of bar codes and shelf tags on the floor to display inventory and order information. This is particularly beneficial in large stores as it saves several back and forth trips.

Point of Sale Ordering
This is a great benefit of a point of sale inventory management system. One can automate a majority of their ordering practices which helps to eliminate human error and keep replenishment at optimum efficiency. The method in which it occurs will be dependant on the system. When a customer purchases an item, the system speaks to the inventory management system to let it know it is now down an object. With some systems, it would automatically place an order with a distributor to replace that item. For other products it may operate by the case. One would not particularly want cases of canned cat food being ordered every time one can sells after all. A business owner can automate a majority of their ordering in this way while still retaining some control for themselves and management through the computer systems. Manual orders are perfectly possible and will still occasionally be necessary for promotions or customer needs.

These are a few of the main benefits that a point of sale inventory management system can offer to a business owner. Automating the order and inventory process saves you and your employees a lot of time and paperwork. This frees employees up to do more important things such as offering superior customer service to help clear those well-stocked shelves. This in turn, means higher profit and reduced shrink.