The stocktaking process is one of the most important processes that help the company determine what it owns of items and materials, and it is one of the accounting operations that take place either at the end or middle of the financial period, and some companies do it on a quarterly basis, and the stocktaking process is done by comparing the balances of assets, debts And the items that are accounted for, with what is already there, and therefore we determine the difference and then search for the reasons for the differences to make the accounts recorded balances exactly match what is in reality, and in this article we will show you all the details about stocktaking, its importance and how it is done.
What is stocktaking?
As for the concept of stocktaking, it means the physical verification of the quantity and condition of the stock available in the company or factory, which helps the company to identify cases of stock shortages.
The stocktaking process is one of the most important processes that help in auditing your stock, which contributes to its better control and thus achieving effective stock management.
Benefits of the stocktaking
Now that we have learned about the importance of stocktaking and its effective role in inventory management, we will now move on to show the benefits of stocktaking:
- It keeps your inventory up-to-date, by providing accurate data on inventory continuously.
- Detecting the factors that negatively affect the stored items, as stocktaking helps you know whether the storage conditions you provide for the items are appropriate or not.
- Detecting theft operations, thus trying to improve security measures and reduce and limit theft.
- Optimize your sales strategies, through continuous monitoring of inventory and knowledge of high-selling and low-selling items.
Why is stocktaking important?
stocktaking is considered one of the important processes in inventory management and auditing, which positively affects the continuation of work efficiently and without problems.
The following are a number of points that illustrate the importance of stocktaking:
- Recognize and remedy your inventory shortage.
- Knowing the damaged stock or the one that is close to being damaged.
- Detecting cases of stock theft.
- Get to know your turnover.
- Detecting thefts and identifying inventory shrinkage issues.
- Identify issues with damaged inventory and missing or unfulfilled requisitions.
- Expose poor inventory control practices.
- Ensure that business objectives are achieved by addressing issues that will arise during the stocktaking process.
- Determining the performance of products and thus identifying the popular and stagnant products.
- Maximize the performance of storage requests operations.
- Strengthen pricing strategies by analyzing your sales and profits, identifying and thus maximizing profits.
How do you do stocktaking?
stocktaking is a meticulously organized process for the purpose of maintaining and continuity of the business.
Although this process varies by business, there are a number of basic steps when conducting stocktaking, as:
- Before beginning the count, pause sales and purchases, take time to resolve discrepancies and resolve issues, and eliminate any distractions.
- During the count process, stock all salable stock, recording all stock levels on the shelf.
- After the count process, estimate the inventory correctly and check your evaluation of it again, then renew the inventory items that are close to being sold out, check the discrepancies in the inventory and determine their causes.
How often should stocktaking be done?
To be able to maintain good stocktaking levels, as well as eliminate stock losses, and ensure accurate stocktaking records, you will need to do stocktaking once a month.
But make sure you do it right so that it doesn’t go too long without fruitful results.
How to improve your stocktaking?
As for the way in which you can improve stocktaking, there is more than one way in which you can enhance your stocktaking by relying on a number of modern tools and techniques, as:
Barcode scanning
Which will help you speed up the process and reduce the chance of making mistakes while taking stock counts.
Cloud-based inventory management
Which will help you effectively in monitoring inventory levels and actual response, thus keeping track of inventory movements and maintaining up-to-date information on your inventory.
Regular stock takes.
which helps you address any issues that may arise in stock, thus identifying the best as well as underperforming products.
Allocate one counter
Which helps to avoid making mistakes while collecting huge information, especially since many employees miscommunicate with each other in teamwork.
Stocktaking with inventory management software
Inventory management software can help you to make the best stocktaking, as it has many modern techniques and methods.
Which make the stocktaking process more accurate and less time consuming as well. Diggipacks provides you with the best inventory management software that helps you in:
- Updating products as quickly as possible.
- Moving inventory from one place to another with ease.
- Enabling you to know all the movements of your inventory periodically.
- Determining the spaces needed to store it without any human intervention.
