5 Benefits of Counting Your Inventory Regularly

Having an accurate and up-to-date tally of your inventory is vital to running a successful business. Whether doing full counts or cycle counting, regular inventory counting gives you better overall snapshots of your business, increases your sales and improves your customer service. Here are the top five benefits of counting your inventory regularly:  

1. Better insights

Regular inventory counting gives you full visibility of your business. Knowing what you have on hand allows your management team to make data-driven decisions when ordering products. Knowing what you have in stock will help you decipher which items are best sellers, hold higher value and need to be restocked more often.

Regular counting helps your business create a plan for ordering, ensuring you restock best-selling items on time and reducing the possibility of inconveniencing your customers. With regular inventory tracking and stock control, you can spot sales trends, improve merchandising, track recalled products and make better buying decisions.  Save costs, and make sure you have the right products at the right times, it all flows from understanding what you have.

2. Generate more sales

Counting your inventory regularly can generate more sales in a variety of ways. For starters, happy customers who have their orders fulfilled and delivered on time will likely recommend your business to others, resulting in increased sales in your business. Counting your inventory regularly can also generate more sales through the understanding of what you have on hand and recommending in-stock products only. Understanding your inventory’s availability and demands leads to higher inventory turnover, which leads to greater profits.

Stock costs money unless it sells, and storage costs such as storage handling and transportation reduce your business’s profit.

3. Decrease waste

If you don’t know what you have in stock, there’s a good chance you’re holding on to expired inventory. Businesses with perishable items, in particular, should be counting their inventory regularly to ensure nothing goes to waste.  All inventory is constantly depreciating, or losing value, knowing what you have allows you to make decisions about sales or even writing down your inventory.

Inventory carrying expenses quickly eat away at profits if companies have spoiled or obsolete inventory. Counting your inventory regularly will help you operate more sustainably, get a good baseline for inventory levels and ensure your business has products customers want, when they need them.

Annual inventory counts can be messy and time-consuming. Depending on the size of the business, many annual inventory counts can last a minimum of two full days even with a team of employees dedicated to the count. 

Counting your inventory regularly will help your company save on labor costs by reducing both the time spent completing the count and the number of employees assisting with the count. Depending on the size of your business, regular inventory counts can be accomplished in a few hours with less employees than otherwise would be required. 

Counting your inventory regularly also reduces the risk of errors, and if by chance there are errors, those errors or discrepancies are easier to find. To avoid waste of time and resources, counting your inventory regularly is extremely helpful.  

5. Improved customer service

When you have well-maintained records, you don’t leave your customers hanging. Customers who receive what they order, on time.  This will create more loyalty to your business. When you are well informed about your data and inventory, you will know exactly what you have on hand and what you will need to order. So, when a customer makes an order, facilitating a quick delivery can be easy.

Quick deliveries and good customer service will keep your customers loyal to your business. By counting your inventory regularly, you can avoid a potential discrepancy between your in-person inventory and what your online inventory reads, which can disappoint customers when they visit your store.

If you don’t count your inventory regularly, your customers won’t receive their products on time and your business can be at risk of losing out on future sales.

The bottom line

Counting your inventory regularly is the best way to increase profits and retain loyal customers. PureCount’s inventory counting software produces quick and efficient counting solutions with accurate results. Interested in learning more about PureCount? Check out our Counting Solutions.