Once you have full visibility over your inventory management, you can start to see how to grow sales, margins and efficiency throughout your business. Here’s everything you need to know about using inventory reporting to analyse — and improve — your business processes.
What is an inventory report?
If you want to manage business operations efficiently, you need to pay attention to reports. To track the profitability and growth of a business, these reports are extremely crucial. In short, they give you a holistic view of your company. One such report is an inventory report. Inventory reports are helpful and necessary — in a wide variety of ways.
An inventory report is a summary of the amount of inventory a business has on hand at a given time. It is a term covering any reports relating to purchase management, production management, what’s on order, in production, in the warehouse and allocated for sale, and sales reporting. It can be a physical or electronic document.
Good inventory reports contain up-to-date information with a high level of detail and use visuals to make it clear how many of a given item you have in stock. Inventory reports help you avoid over-ordering inventory or running out of inventory.
The importance of inventory reports
Creating good inventory reports is essential to sustaining a healthy product business. It enables you to identify problems quickly, control costs and get more satisfied customers.
Identify problems quickly
Inventory records detail everything that comes into and out of the warehouse. When kept up to date, they can help you identify any problems affecting performance: such as product loss through theft or dead stock.
Control business costs
Up-to-date inventory records help you keep up with your costs. They can show you which suppliers offer the best deals, freight and transport costs, cost of returns and more so you can adjust your expenses accordingly.
Maintain customer service standards
Using inventory reports, your customer service team or sales rep will know where to quickly get the right stock and pricing information for customers. If customers face delays and long wait times, they might switch to a competitor who can provide them with the right information and products quicker.
7 Key Inventory Reports Every Business Owner Needs To Know
Most companies know that having inventory reports are important for business growth. We’ve compiled a list of 7 inventory management reports that you can use to improve your business. These 7 inventory reports are a great starting point for business to analyse their inventory management and business performance.
1. Multi-Stock Location Report
A multi-stock location inventory report enables your business to track inventory across all of your stock locations, warehouses, distribution centers. If one location is low on inventory, you have the option of deciding if you should order more stock from your suppliers or if transferring inventory from a warehouse in close proximity would be better.
2. Inventory On-Hand Report
With an inventory on-hand report, you can accurately gauge the disparity between allocated stock and available stock, resulting in fewer stock-outs and more sales opportunities.
3. Inventory Change Report
When analysing the inventory outflow, knowing how many products are entering and exiting your warehouses is insufficient. Instead, understanding the “why” is essential to capturing efficiencies. For that, use an inventory change report to track how inventory is being depleted and why.
4. Stock-Reorder Report
Stocks re-order report indicates when a re-order of goods is necessary. Using a stock re-order report for each stock location to understand what products to replenish, helps you avoid low-stock and stock outs situations.
5. Purchase Order Report
A purchase order report allows you to track what stock is incoming and when it will be arriving at your warehouse. Using a purchase order report, you can then account for incoming product appropriately, plan ahead on order fulfilment, and prevent over-ordering, helping to streamlining your entire supply chain.
6. Inventory Pick List Report
A pick list is a list of items for your operations team to take from inventory. Typically this is for the purpose of fulfilling customers’ orders for the day or for supplying to the production of finished goods. The use of pick lists enables accurate inventory on-hand numbers because it includes consideration of inventory dedicated to orders or production.
7. Sales Reports
Business success is dependent on revenue which comes from product sales to customers. A sales report helps you to analyse your company’s performance. To have a good sales report, you will need to be able to break your sales down into different time periods, for various products, and customer level. Through these different insights, you can uncover trends to help you identify your top customers, and help you forecast inventory better in the future.
Conclusion
In conclusion, inventory reports help you run your business without interruption. They can help you cut costs and reduce the risk of running out of stock. Inventory reporting seems like extra time or paperwork, but it can save you a ton of money and unnecessary effort.
