11 Best Inventory Management Software for Small Businesses in 2023

And it’s a double hit — you can’t recoup the cost of inventory and you can’t sell the inventory to make revenue. There are four main categories of inventory shrinkage due to loss and theft. Some experts also have a fifth category that encompasses all unknown reasons for inventory loss; it makes up six percent of all inventory shrinkage. We reviewed the overall quality of each system’s features—and if there are any stand-out qualities—and whether or not it offers a good value for its price point.

In addition to the bundling and kitting tools nearly all the others have, it can track products and supplies at all levels of the manufacturing process. Plus, it has automatic workflows, so you can concentrate on making the best products quickly. Overall, our top pick for inventory management systems for small businesses is Zoho Inventory. Ideally, your physical inventory counts will match your projected QOHs. If you have more or less of a product than anticipated, you will need to investigate the problem and reconcile the difference.

Summary of the Best Inventory Management Software for Small Businesses of 2023

Do you receive large shipments and sell a high volume of products each month? Your inventory management software should be able to integrate with all sales channels, whether they’re online, in store or both. Use this https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/small-business-inventory/ count sheet template to keep accurate counts of your entire inventory. Sample text helps guide you through a comprehensive inventory-management process, so that you can efficiently meet your business’s inventory objectives. Use this template to ensure that you account for all of your business’s inventory.

• This ultimately helps you maximize profit and keep waste to a minimum.
• Perhaps a purchase order slipped through the cracks and you ended up running out of a best-selling item.
• Also, spreadsheets can’t scale with your business, can’t communicate with your POS, and don’t show you how your products are selling.
• It wrote off $2.25 billion in raw materials and equipment components as a loss.

The automated solutions provided by inventory management software help analyze trends in the data for faster and better raw material orders and replenishment. This includes running inventory analysis and comparing it against the production rate. Automation allows businesses to monitor the demand by tracking sales numbers closely over time and identifying seasonality and other trends. Inventory management software analyzes data in real-time and enables inventory managers to run custom reports on demand to produce advanced analysis for more informed, strategic decisions. Real-time inventory tracking enables SMBs to monitor inventory levels and fix anomalies before they become bigger problems. Spreadsheets that need to be updated manually cannot be used to monitor inventories in the moment-to-moment changes that happen daily.

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It’s critical for small businesses to reliably and cost-effectively manage their inventory. A reduction of inventory in a retail store is often referred to as shrinkage. And in 2016, shrinkage cost retailers more than $49 million in losses, according to the National Retail Security Survey on retail theft.

• Cycle counts are periodic spot counts that take inventory of specific categories or subsets of products.
• If there is a quality control issue or a discrepancy with a purchase order, having a good relationship with your supplier can help resolve these issues quickly.
• Its free plan, while not as good as Odoo for pure inventory, is nonetheless very strong.
• After finding discrepancies, it’s time for some detective work to discover what went wrong.
• Powering over 5,500 ecommerce businesses, it not only handles inventory but also automates ecommerce tasks, works with 200+ shipping carriers, and has manufacturing management tools.

There are many ways to plan and manage your inventory, each guided by your product and business needs. The pull strategy is based on customer demand, where you order small amounts of inventory as needed. The push strategy, on the other hand, https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/ relies on forecasting and is based on expected or predicted demand. The just-in-time strategy generates products at the time they are ordered. The strategy used varies by industry, type of business and the company’s inventory strategy.

Do regular inventory counts

You get the Inventory software (or any single Odoo app) free—complete, no strings attached. If you want to add other Odoo apps, like POS, websites, CRM, and the like, then you have to pay for a plan. All plans, including the free one, include unlimited support, hosting, and maintenance. If you need more features, however, like sales and CRM, then Odoo has an entire set of integratable apps that you can get for one low monthly price.

This software excels in providing easy access to information from anywhere in the program. It offers comprehensive inventory features for creating custom orders, kitting features, assemblies, matrixed products, and product substitutions to set this system apart. With competitive pricing to Lightspeed and its own POS, we chose it for its excellent B2B tools.

Specific Identification

We looked primarily for inventory-first programs as opposed to POS programs with inventory (although two POS systems made our list). We then narrowed our list of over two dozen software systems to those that are easy to use and have pricing plans suited for SMBs. After that, we evaluated for inventory tracking, reports, low-stock alerts, and more. We also gave points for handling multiple warehouses or sales channels, integrations, and customer support.

Cloud-based automatic sync ensures your team can seamlessly update inventory in real time from any device. After identifying the cause of inventory shrinkage, the next step is to write off the damages. This is an important part of accounting and compliance, but should also lead to process improvements and new policies. Upload the data to the POS system
The POS provider may have support for this process, or information may be available in the POS manual. Most POS systems allow users to upload data using the CSV file format.