Retail stores, especially small and medium stores that sell goods to local communities might not see the purpose of taking a small medium operation digital, but they can always benefit from the transformation. While most solutions are prohibitively expensive for small and medium scale operations, Folderit can serve as an economical, yet capable inventory management solution for retail stores.
Inventory management for retail store cost efficiency
The mere act of maintaining inventory can incur a series of costs. These can broadly be described as
- Ordering costs – purchasing inventory, paying vendors, inspections, shipping, etc.
- Carrying costs – electric bills, manpower, management space, etc. are all costs you incur to cater to inventory while sits on your shelves.
- Shortage costs – This is an indirect cost that you incur by losing a sale if an item isn’t available.
A business owner knows all about when their supplies are about to run short and when certain items are about to expire. Keeping balance between stocked inventory and reordering supplies without incurring shortage costs is called Economic Order Quantity. Folderit lets you manage this entire process natively.
If you keep and manage inventory on paper, you can continue doing that in parallel to a digital solution. Just upload a copy of it to Folderit and mark it with date of purchase. Then, put a reminder on it to coincide with your next order and you, along with any other team members, will be notified when it is time to stock up.
You can also set a retention period on shelf items with expiry dates, that way, they cease showing up in your system as they expire, and you won’t risk selling or stocking expired goods. Also helps cleanup.
Folderit lets you take it one step further, if you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription, you can put it into Microsoft Excel and manage the entire process from there.
If you have employees, you can give them limited access to your content such that they can view/preview it. And/or if you want to give them elevated rights, you can set it up that they require your approval before publishing any new items.
Managing Retail Business Records
A legal business operates on a track made of paperwork. Business registration, inspections, quality audits, item expiries etc. are all supposed to be tracked and recorded. However, none of this needs to be made public. Folderit values your security and privacy to the point that even Folderit’s own team cannot view your content. To further protect your data from unauthorized access, Folderit enacts a 256-bit bank level encryption and all transfers are done through a Secure Socket Layer (SSL), all to make sure that your content is protected in this Inventory management for retail store solution.
Moreover, if you connect your inventory with Folderit, you can used the advance search function, powered by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to search through read-only items like scans and images. That way, you could take a picture of your inventory and Folderit will track the item down for you along with any additional metadata (or custom metadata for that matter) you may have put in it.
Inventory Optimization
With Folderit, you can double down on reducing:
- Cost of storage (through EOQ)
- Retail Shrinkage (by keeping things organized)
- Administrative errors (fewer steps between accomplishing tasks)
- Dead stock (getting rid of things that are no longer “in” or unsellable)
- Supply Chain issues
You can also take vacations now, without having to worry about your entire business being in someone else’s hands. Folderit is as remotely accessible as you are. As long as you have a web-enabled device with a functional internet connection, you can keep track of your entire operation remotely. If you need to upload anything new, simply send an email to a designated address that comes with your Folderit subscription and it, along with the email body (as metadata) will be will automatically upload to your Folderit account.
Conclusion
Retail businesses have remained consistent throughout history, a vendor keeps items for consumers to purchase. Technology has helped simplify that process for everyone involved from purchasing, to management to security. Folderit is a low-cost solution that helps ease every stage of the inventory management process. It is flexible to the needs a retail business owner.
