Let’s get serious. About 43% of small business owners are not using technology to track inventory, or they’re using a manual process for perhaps the most mundane area of running a retail business. Are you one of them? The bigger question is, why? 

It’s just crazy. If you haven’t jumped on board with inventory management tech tools yet, at the very least you should be using barcode technology. It’s way easier than recording inventory numbers by hand. And the margin for error is greatly reduced just by taking that one simple step.

With a barcode scanner there may be one error for every 10 thousand scans, but if you write or key in numbers by hand, it’s more like 10 errors for every one thousand manual keystrokes.

Can you see how human error can wreck havoc to your bottom line? Just one out-of-sequence identification number can trickle down to losing track of items, which could cause shipment delays and even over-ordering on items that are simply misplaced.

What about the loss of time spent over such silly mistakes? Do you want warehouse workers or stockroom clerks to waste productivity in search of misplaced inventory? Not very efficient, wouldn’t you say? 

It’s hard to understand why a small business owner would not want to embrace tech tools to improve inventory efficiency. It’s hard enough to make a sales profit in today’s competitive marketplace. Why struggle with inventory woes too? 

Get control of your inventory. It’s your choice, of course, and if your shop is small enough where managing inventory by hand makes economic sense, then, by all means, continue on.

But, if you’re looking to grow, ask an inventory management service for some expert guidance on how to do things better.