Why Stocktake?
Inventory counting is essential for all product-based businesses.
No matter the type of your business or the scale, it always pays to conduct regular stocktakes.
Stocktaking essentially refers to manually counting your stock or inventory and matching it up with your stock records to find any discrepancies. Discovering such discrepancies helps to pick up and resolve any store-level issues leading to better stock management and control. A third-part stocktaking provides the most unbiased and accurate numbers that any business requires. Likewise, stocktaking helps you to uncover countless ways to boost your business. Let’s look at some.
Detect theft & improve inventory tracking
To rely entirely on your system for accurate stock levels is always a bad idea. Stocktaking compares the actual stock level to what you (or your system) thought you had on-hand; hence finding discrepancies and fixing it before they become chaotic. Not checking and fixing stock or inventory levels regularly can lead to:
- Stockouts (running out of products to sell)
- Overstocking (too many products to sell)
- Dead stock (products become obsolete while in the store)
Discover stock issues
A manual check is always necessary as a software or system cannot be relied and can lead to flaws such as damaged goods, missing orders and poor stock control arrangements. Though sometimes such issues cause only a smaller impact, it can indicate greater fault in stock management and even your system. A stocktake provides the opportunity to find stock issues and improve the processes for the future.
Improve stock ordering processes
When a stocktake helps you detect stock/inventory issues, it also prompts to change your processes so as to enable you to address the respective issues and to effectively prevent such errors to a large extent.
Ensure the business is meeting targets
When major discrepancies are found in your numbers, you may want to make sure that your business is on par with your financial goals. Stocktake saves you from terrible surprise at the end of financial year by fixing problems sooner and effectively.
Observe and improve ‘product performance’ and pricing
A good business should ‘learn’ their products in terms of their demand in the market. Stocktake helps you determine products that are popular and the ones you should slash prices on to keep the stocks moving. This, in turn, guides a business to enhance their product pricing that corresponds to the market, making it easier to sell products quickly while maximizing profits.
