All About Stock Inventory Software, Purposes, Features And Top Brands

To what extent does the stock inventory software provide you a convenience in managing your data? In the manufacturing industry, stock inventory software is one of the must-have software that helps create word order, bill of materials, and other production-related documents.

So what is stock inventory software? Based on the standardized definition, it is a software system designed for tracking inventory levels, sales, and deliveries as well as orders. This software is usually used by the company to avoid overstock and outages. It is also defined as a tool that organizes inventory data before you store them in a hard-copy form or in terms of the spreadsheet.

What does stock inventory software offer? The answer must be much dealing with the purpose and features of the software that we are going to explore in this article now. So don’t go anywhere and find out how convenient the software is to organize data in your company.

 

The Purpose of Stock Inventory Software

Most companies have the main purpose of using stock inventory software to reduce their carrying costs. As we have mentioned, this software is basically used to track the products and parts when they are transported from the vendor to the warehouse, between the warehouse and finally to the customer or retail location.

Stock Inventory Software

 

There are some purposes of using stock inventory software that are:

  • Keep the balance between too much and too little inventory.
  • Receiving goods into a warehouse of other place.
  • Tracking inventory when transported from one location to other location.
  • Picking, packing and shipping the goods from the warehouse.
  • Recording track of levels of the inventory and product sales.
  • Reducing the product obsolescence and spoilage.
  • Prevent the missing out on sales because there might be some out-of-stock situations.

 

The Features of Stock Inventory Software

smart Stock Inventory

 

Stock inventory software is completely designed with the several key features or components that work together to make manageable inventory or many companies or organizations systems. This features include the asset tracking, the reorder point, the service management, the inventory optimization and the product identification.

Here are the details of each features:

 

Asset Tracking

Asset tracking is one of the crucial features of stock inventory software. It is due to the role of the software in tracking the products in a warehouse or store using the barcode or other means of tracking such as serial numbers.

For the business, the software often uses not only barcode and serial number but also radio-frequency identification (RFID) and wireless tracking technology.

Thus, stock inventory software is considered important since it is tracking the company’s assets.

 

Reorder Point

Reorder point feature is designed to create a program of a company’s inventory management system in order to tell the managers to reorder the products. This feature also helps the company not to run out the stock of the products. Thus, the inventory will be able to reach the specific threshold.

 

Service Management

In order to provide services for the customers like cleaning supplies, the company must be primarily service-oriented instead of product-oriented. This way, the company uses the software in tracking the cost of the materials used to provide the service. In utilizing this feature, prices can be attached to the services to reflect the total cost.

 

Inventory Optimization

Inventory optimization is the other feature of the software to attain the key inventory optimization metrics using the fully automated demand forecasting and inventory optimization system.

Inventory optimization includes the reorder point that states the number or units to trigger replenishment order and order quantity that states the number of a must-reorder unit according to the reorder point, stock order and stock on hand.

Later, the inventory optimization also includes the lead demand about the number of units to sell during the lead time, the stock over about the number of days left before a stock-out if there is no reorder and the accuracy of the forecast.

 

Product Identification

Other feature added to this stock inventory software is the product information. In this case, giving information about the product uses Barcodes at which the data on the products and orders are inputted into the software. To read the barcode, the software uses a barcode reader. Thus, we can derive the information on the products represented.

Besides using barcodes, reading the product information can uses Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and wireless methods. Further, QR codes or NFC tags to identify the inventory products and smartphones as scanners. This way, the methods come with the choice to track the inventory using the barcode scanning without purchasing the expensive scanning hardware.

 

3 Best Free and Open Source Inventory Management Software

To provide you with the example of stock inventor software, we comes with the 3 best free and open source stock inventory software. Those are Odoo, Square for Retail and Zoho Inventory.

Free Inventory Management Software

 

Odoo

Managing inventory is typically difficult to perform, therefore, only warehouse or operations managers know. This way, the managing inventory includes recording the units, item number and location of each inventory products. This is aimed to ensure that there is enough stock to fulfill the customers’ orders.

Odoo is an open source ERP solution offering modules for managing variety of business function suc as CRM, eCommerce management, point of sale, supply chain, inventory management and expense management.

Odoo also allows users to track the delivery orders, requests, backorders, drop-shipping, receptions and transfer requests for inventory products. The module provided by Odoo comes with the different shipping providers such as FedEx, UPS, DHL and local post offices, making the shipping operation easy and well-managed. Further, the module also supports the barcode scanner technology through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB connections. The module’s integration is seamless with the other modules in ERP ecosystem. Thus, you don’t need to update inventory and accounting reports manually whenever you sell a product.

One more, Odoo offers customer support through portal request and phone.

 

Square For Retail

The next example of stock inventory software is Square For Retail. This software is a cloud-based retail management and POS system designed to help business manage both online and offline retail operations. The key features of this software are the website builder, inventory management, check out and payment management, reporting and order management.

The inventory management features are available in square’s free plan especially for stock tracking and counting. The free version includes low stock alerts notifying the users when the levels of inventory drop below the critical order volume. This situation will help initiate the inventory replenishment before the stock outages give an impact to normal operations.

Square’s customer support options are phone, live chat, email, self-service knowledge base and social media.

 

Zoho Inventory

If you prefer a cloud-based inventory management solution, Zoho Inventory is probably the right option. Zoho inventory comes with the features of inventory control, warehouse management, order management and multichannel selling.

Zoho Inventory’s free plan supports two users to manage the inventory orders, track shipments and warehouse activity both in online and offline way. This makes you able to manage purchases that are made using e-Commerce platform.

There are some different options for customer support such as FAQs, forums, email, self-service knowledge base and phone support.

If you are interested in free plan of Zoho inventory, there are 25 orders for online and offline purchases while if you want the paid plans, the rate starts from $49 per organization per month.

 

Final Words

All in all, stock inventory software is designed to give you ease in managing data especially the stock inventory. Some features are added to the software to make the inventory more manageable in the organization system.

We have also included the 3 examples of stock inventory software in this article. You may try the free plans first, and get the paid version if you think you need the software to provide convenience to your business or organization.

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