For any business enterprise regardless of its size, the challenge of tracking and managing inventories must be dealt with. The challenge gets even more amplified if the size of the business gets expanded with time. Rationally, to expand the sales funnel and achieve more customer satisfaction, it becomes a fundamental necessity to use inventory tracking software.

Fortunately, there are plenty of inventory management solutions out there in the market. But with all these options available today, it becomes imperative to determine which one has the most important features.

We always recommend to point out your own needs first before you look for the features. However, in this article, we will go over the must-have features to look for in an inventory tracking software. Before that let’s have a look at the reasoning and benefits of having an inventory management solution.

Do you really need an inventory tracking solution?

Ask yourself:

1. Do you have to sign in or sign out for the different sales channels to list the process orders and products?
2. Do you need to manually adjust the level of the stocks on each platform each time you make a sale?
3. Do you want to get automatically generated inventory reports to know how many stocks you should purchase with respect to the needs and demands?

If the answers to these questions are “yes” then you must go for an inventory tracking software to be more productive, efficient and above all to enjoy an extra holiday with your family. 🙂

Benefits of using an inventory management tool

The benefits include:

1. Being able to manage your inventories in a simplified way.
2. As the data are calculated by machine, chances are little that there will be an error.
3. Helps to maintain an equilibrium point or balance the stock level so as not to oversell.
4. Enables you to cut costs, maximize sales and profits.
5. Keeps your customers happy and enhance your reputation or goodwill.

6 must-have features of an inventory tracking software

If you are planning to streamline your small business with an inventory management tool, you must ensure that the tool has the following features:

Tracking inventories

This is the focal point when it comes to the inventory management tool. As a business grows, the inventory management gets more complex over time due to the increased volume of data.

A full-fledged inventory management solution should not only have all the bells and whistles but the interface must be user-friendly with intuitive functionalities required to track inventories efficiently.

Security and backups

What if all the inventory data gets deleted? It can be a catastrophe, isn’t it? An advanced inventory management solution will help you restore the data even if you uninstall the software mistakenly. Besides, with regular updates, a solution can ensure that all of your data is free from the evil motives of hackers.

Integration with other related solutions

No matter how many tools you are using, you must make sure that the data passing through all the tools are consistent with each other. But, it is often painful to maintain accurate data if you are using different solutions for different purposes.

This is why you need to use such an inventory tracking solution as can be easily integrated with other solutions for the purpose of maintaining the accuracy of data among all the different tools.

Automatic reporting

This is the most wanted feature and it is also the bottom line of your inventory management process. Reports will enable you to create and maintain a seamless workflow which is useful because they can pinpoint product supply and demand.

Two common examples of inventory reports are product purchase and product sales. Whenever you go to choose an inventory management solution you must ensure the tool has these two reports.

Bug fixing and updates

The world is not perfect and so is an inventory tracking system. Before choosing a solution, make sure that the software providers don’t turn cold shoulders when any important fix is required. Besides, with the change of rules and regulations of the federal government, you may need to update your system immediately.

Scalability

With the continual expansion of your business, you will need multiple pieces of software to manage your business. For example, you need to keep track of the attendance, payroll, recruitment, reimbursement for managing human resources, automate emails for your clients, maintain bookkeeping and generate other accounting reports and many more.

For these purposes, you may need to scale your inventory management system. These features can be added to your inventory management software only if the tool is scalable.

Over to you

Very often, as a simple medium, small business owners use spreadsheets to record and calculate inventory data. But the bottom line is that these spreadsheets are not specialized in dealing with the inventory tracking process.

On the other hand, an inventory management system is solely dedicated to keeping the record and forecast trends which are necessary to make informed business decisions.

We suggest you try the WordPress Inventory Management Plugin that can help you reduce the operational costs, efforts and like we said, enjoy one more happy holiday with your family. Hit the “Try Demo” button from below to test the plugin and get hands-on experience.

Try Demo

After clicking the button make sure to select the inventory option as indicated by the red arrow. Next hit the “Start Your Demo” button to get started and play around the tool.

If you face any difficulty while using the demo, you can go through this documentation as a guide on how to use the tool in an effective way.