Stock control is an essential part of most business operations. It can help you save money, understand your costs better and work more efficiently. With that being said, some persistent misconceptions about inventory management don’t ring true for more businesses.
In this article, we cover the top 5 myths that we’ve seen making the rounds and uncover the truth behind these statements.
Fact: it’s important to understand all your costs when it comes to purchasing stock. There are heaps of factors that impact the costs of your order and the cheapest overall way of sourcing stock. While buying in bulk can often come with discounts and cheaper landed costs, other factors like the cost of storage, the perishability of the stock and the opportunity cost need to be taken into account.
For example, buying in stock might be cheaper, but if the stock is perishable, then you might need to consider your certainty that you can on-sell the goods in time. Plus, consider what other goods your could be storing or purchasing instead of buying one object in bulk. While it can often be a good idea, understanding your costs and stock better can help you make better decisions on a case by case basis.
Fact: A lot of businesses think of stock and job costing as two separate functions or tasks in their business. But, the truth is that there is a lot of overlap between the two, so thinking of them as linked functions can help you get more insights and benefits.
When you know how much stock you have, you can give your customers a more accurate estimate of the completion time for a project. Knowing your actual landed costs help you accurately quote and improve your ability to make money on your projects. Going the other way, reporting stock use on projects can help you organically keep your records up-to-date which allows you to do less stock takes while still knowing what you have.
Fact: Having effective stock control methods can help you save time and money. If you are already operating a business, then getting a stock control system set up can have some hefty time and cost commitments but the benefits can outweigh these quickly. For one, you save hours in future stock takes, searching for the stock you may or may not have and manually updating records.
You can also saved heaps of money as you can better plan your purchases and are much less likely to spend money on stock you don’t need. WorkGuru client Hydromech talks about how they’ve said thousands on stock by having better inventory management. Read their story here.
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Workguru.io’s in-built inventory management tools work hand in hand with powerful project management to help you manage your operations from one platform. The stock management tools help you get insights into your stock and purchasing and make it easy to track your supplies over multiple locations and projects.
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