If you’re looking to grow your business, increase efficiency, and drive sales, there’s a strong chance you’d benefit from improved inventory tracking.

Detailed tracking of your stock, sales, returns/exchanges, and more can help you to identify what your business is doing well and where it could improve. Unfortunately, all of that data entry and re-entry, not to mention the lengthy calculations, can be time-consuming, or even inaccurate.

But what if there was technology available to do that for you?

It’s called an inventory management system, and it's a form of operational software that tracks your business’s goods from production to shipping, and everything in-between. And if you don’t already have one, it’s time to join the club.

Here are just four reasons why.

1. Improve accuracy by automating tasks.

As humans, we are subject to error, so it’s great when we can use technology to reduce our error-rate: Your inventory management system has the ability to do so by automating certain tasks, while also reducing the number employees needed to perform those tasks.

From stock management to tracking sales, your inventory management system keeps a record of your business’s operations. Not only will you no longer need an employee dedicated to data entry, but without the potential for human error, you’ll also increase tracking accuracy.

With you and your employees spending less time doing math, or reworking miscalculations, you’ll be able to spend more time doing the work only humans can do.

2. Increase sales through insights and predictions.

In addition to automating tasks, inventory management systems can offer insights based on your business’s analytics. You can use these insights to make sales forecasts, or educated guesses on how your business will perform in the future.

Each month, the inventory management system records the data from your sales. The longer this system is in place, the better you’ll be able to identify trends in product sales, returns, and more.

Once you make a sales forecast, you can determine what products you should add or remove from your inventory. You can also compare your sales forecasts to the analytics to see how accurate your predictions were.

Overall, these insights increase your likelihood of boosting sales, while reducing your chances of ordering stock you don’t need. As a result, you’re not only more likely to make money but save some as well.

3. Reduce ‘dead stock’ with improved stock management.

There’s one thing that no business wants: dead stock. Dead stock ties up your money in products that aren’t selling, and makes you wish you didn’t purchase them in the first place.

Right now, you probably utilize Periodic Automatic Replenishment (PAR Level): When your stock reaches the minimum amount required to ensure the needs of your customers are met, you automatically order more stock.

Unfortunately, PAR Level often leaves you ordering more, or less, stock than you actually need. It is also subject to poor stock management due to miscalculations from human error or lack of sales forecasts.

An inventory management system, however, can help you to bypass this problem. By tracking your inventory, calculating sales forecasts, and more, it can more accurately determine what will, or won’t sell, and order products only when you really need them.

4. Enhance your customer experience.

To keep your business growing, you’ll need to grow your customer base, and to do so, you’ll need happy customers. Two great ways to keep your customers appeased are: 1) ensure popular items are always in stock and 2) offer an easy exchange/return process.

Your inventory management system can help to ensure that all of the right products are readily available, namely those in high demand. In this way, you’ll be able to ship orders to your customers as quickly as possible.

Moreover, if the product doesn’t work out for a customer, no problem. All orders and invoices are tracked by your inventory management system, making it fast and simple to process exchanges or returns.

Ready for your own operational software?

Acquiring an inventory management system will require the help of a software development team. By taking a look at your business’s needs and future goals, a developer can build you a system specially designed to optimize your tracking and help your business reach its full potential.

Over the past 10 years, ClikFocus has been building effective operational software for businesses like yours. We want to offer you the technology that will reduce your opportunity costs and keep your staff doing what only what humans can do.