Tips for choosing Inventory Management Software

For any business, inventory management software can be one of the most important tools. You may lose out a big amount of sales if you don't have a proper inventory management technique.
Imagine this scenario. A customer is visiting your retail store to buy something that you don't have in stock. What's the impression the customer is going to have about your store?

If your business cannot keep your most selling items in stock and meet your customer's demands, you do not have a good balance on your business.

What is inventory management software?


Inventory management software is a software system for tracking inventory levels, orders, sales, and deliveries. It can also be used in the manufacturing industry to create a work order, bill of materials, and other production-related documents. Companies use inventory management software to avoid product overstock and outages. It is a tool for organizing inventory data that before was generally stored in hard-copy form or spreadsheets. (Wikipedia)

Benefits of proper inventory management


When you manage your inventory properly, you will gain better insights across all your sales. Better inventory management can help you in increasing sales, understanding your sales performance, increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, smart inventory planning, and better purchasing.

Proper inventory management will also help you have a well-organized warehouse.

How to choose the right inventory management for your business?


Choosing the right inventory management that aligns with your business requirements is not easy.

There are many inventory management software that comes with ERP Software or you can choose software only for inventory management. You need to consider your requirements, the amount you are willing to spend the inventory management software, the features you need, support systems, etc.

Understanding your inventory management requirements


Before you start your inventory management software research, you need to list out your requirements. What are the features you need? Is it scalable? Can you use it for multiple warehouses? Will you get automated inventory alerts?

Listing out your requirements will help you in understanding what exactly you should be looking for.

Your budget


The price of the inventory management system is decided based on your usage requirements like the number of users, type of the system, the features you need, etc. If you are short on budget and don't want to spend a lot on the software, you can choose for subscription-based products that are cloud-based and affordable.

Scalability


If the products you are selling is not something very common in the market, you will need some customizations to be done on the software to meet your requirements. Having a customized system in place will make it easy for your employees to manage the inventory.

Managing multiple warehouses

As your business grows, you are going to add new warehouses to meet your requirements. Maintaining the inventory across these multiple warehouses is going to be a tedious task if you don't have a proper inventory management system. You should be able to manage the inventory across the different warehouses separately and all together.

An inventory management system with a multi-warehouse feature can help you in managing the stock transfer between multiple warehouses, track the inventory status in each warehouse, and make informed decisions.

Third-party integrations


As a part of your business, you will need to integrate the inventory software with other software like your sales management software or accounting software. Before you decide on an inventory software you should check whether it is possible to integrate this inventory management software with your existing accounting software.

Support


When you are getting a new system, you will take some time to adjust to it. Your staff are going to need enough training along with you. In the first few months, you will have many doubts and issues with the software and you would expect someone to get in touch with you sort it out. Check the reviews from old customers and see what they are saying about the support. You don't need something that has poor customer support, especially if you are using the inventory management software for the first time.

Choosing the best inventory management software for your business can be stressful. But if you list down your requirements and study the different options you have, you won't face many difficulties in choosing the right one.