Managing an inventory is crucial since items are continuously entering and leaving the warehouse. For that keeping track of your inventory is essential but with all the operations going on it’s impracticable to do it manually. Yes if you have a small business you can manage it manually but with a medium to large business, it is not feasible. Especially in retail businesses, you need to maintain your inventory efficiently to cater to the needs of consumers.
Repair businesses are one of the industries that need inventory. Different repair parts of cell phones, computers, laptops, etc should be in stock all the time so that whenever you are repairing a device for a customer you have all the necessary parts you need. What if you have committed the repair job in two days to the customer and when you begin with it, you don’t have the right tools? What will you say to your customer? Of course, you will apologize for not fulfilling the commitment, disappointing them, and end up losing a valuable customer or even worst your reputation.
Therefore, keeping track of your inventory is required. For that inventory reports are the major source to determine which and when items are needed. To get a hold of inventory reports, inventory management software is used.
Every good POS software has a reporting module that provides all the data reports for each function in the inventory. Before we get into its benefit let’s have a brief knowledge of inventory reports and their types.
What Are Inventory Reports?
These are the reports that give an overview of all the modules in the inventory from sales to purchasing and bills to invoices. The reporting module collects data from the POS software and generates it in the form of reports. The following are types of inventory reports:
Sales Report
Purchase Report
Inventory Report
Low Stock Report
Payment Report
Damaged Parts Report and more.
What Advantages Inventory Reports Pack for Repair Business?
Running a repair shop without inventory reports is just like hitting a piñata blindfolded. You never know where are you hitting and in what direction you will go to burst it for the candy treat. Do you want to leave your business hanging like a piñata? Well without the inventory reports in POS software that might be the situation you are in. As there is no overview of your business activities, you will have no idea about your business whereabouts and future. Hence, your business is prone to damage.
Inventory reports tell you exactly the point to hit that piñata to load you with sweet treats. Let’s see what benefits it has for the business.
Tracking Items Across Multi-Warehouse
If you are running multiple repair shops across different locations or have multiple warehouses then managing their inventories altogether can be a handful, especially without any helping hand. This is where you need inventory management software to generate an inventory summary report. It gives you all the information about the items in the different warehouses, which inventory is frequently used, and when there rises a need to restock.
It will provide you with the information on which inventory has more items moving in and out and which item is placed in which warehouse. It saves you hundreds of minutes and the hassle of going through each inventory yourself.
You can also analyze at what specific tenure your inventory is facing a high time. It will give you a future insight into how you can tackle this situation and grow your business. Also, you will know which particular items are sold more from your LA warehouse or CA warehouse.
Stock Usage (Parts) and Alerts
To begin with, Stock Usage Report provides all the information related to stock whether it is low stock, parts consumption, reordering frequency, etc. With that information in your hand you can analyze:
- Which kind of item is getting low soon and needs to be restocked
- Which item has a higher or lower consumption rate, hence determining the usability and ordering quality of the item.
- When to reorder so that you are never low on stock and can set low stock alerts accordingly.
- Which vendor are you frequently buying from and what parts are popular in your repair shop?
After analyzing all these points you can easily determine where you have to put your efforts and which areas need attention regarding parts usage.
Prevents Loss of Items due to Theft, Vendor Fraud, or Administrative Errors
One of the major issues faced by any business is inventory leakage. It can be due to theft (both employee or burglary), vendor fraud, or administrative error. In any of the mentioned cases, business suffers a ton of financial loss. But inventory reports can save you from this. By having a detailed overview of all the inventory functions by date and time, you can easily identify the loophole and can take future precautions to eradicate it.
A computer repair shop software -generated inventory report will give you data on all the segments in which your inventory is divided so that you can analyze each part and find the root cause of leakage of any computer or cell phone parts.
Sales to Purchase Ratio
You can get a sales and purchase a summary report which will tell you about the total sales in a specific period and the same goes for purchases. From this, you can identify your strong domain in which your sales are high and can improve areas to enhance sales for increased revenue. Hence you can analyze your sales and purchase cycle.
Ticket Management
Lastly, inventory reports give you an overview of tickets and leads. You can analyze the frequency of tickets over a specific period. Also, you can check the number of repairs assigned to your technicians. This way you can manage your tickets and also keep a check on your employees’ performance. Based on this you can reward them, which will motivate them to work better and help you increase sales for your repair shop.
See how useful can reports be? They help you to achieve accuracy and instill improvements side by side in your repair business.
Start checking your reports daily and let me know how it improved your business?
