As a business owner, you think you have a solid pulse on what your inventory looks like on a day to day basis. But if you are relying on pen and paper inventory management or even an excel sheet to manage your inventory, you’re missing out on business-changing insights. And possibly making yourself more susceptible to mistakes. Data is a huge component of running a successful business. When you’re not able to track it efficiently, you’re missing out on saving time and money in your business. So why is inventory management software so much better than keeping track on a single sheet? Ensure accurate tracking. When you’re only working off of a single sheet and entering everything by hand, you’re opening yourself up for manual mistakes. Maybe this system works when you only have ten pieces of inventory, but most stores are housing hundreds, if not thousands of goods. And if you’re using pen and paper, you’re most likely spending hours every week trying to validate your inventory numbers. If you have multiple locations, your chance for error goes up as you might be moving inventory from store to store and have a hard time reconciling the numbers. Inventory management systems not only save you time by automatically reconciling inventory against goods sold, but it also can save you money by reducing inventory costs. Buy smarter with historical data. Maybe you’re great at looking back through hundreds of sheets to determine which products are your top sellers and which season is their peak. But for most retailers, that’s not the case. Without hard data that shows you your best and worst performers over a period of time, it’s hard to determine what inventory you need to buy in the future to continue sales growth. Inventory management systems provide you the data you need to form insights that will help you forecast and buy smarter- helping you reduce inventory costs by having the right inventory, in front of the right people, at the right time. Pivot quickly with real-time decision making. When you aren’t using a system that intuitively tracks in real-time, you can never be certain that your sales data is always up-to-date. This prevents you from having an accurate sense of what is going on on your sales’ floor and missing the opportunity to quickly adjust tactics for better turn rate on your inventory. A real-time inventory management solution allows you to track what’s happening in your stores anywhere, anytime. Enjoy multi-user access. When you keep track of everything on a single sheet or document, it prevents multiple users from being able to access the document at one time. That means that it’s easier to forget to record a sale or update the inventory sheet. Moving to a cloud-based system allows multiple users to ring sales that are automatically accounted for in your back office. This ensures you’ll always have a pulse on how much inventory you have because everything is up-to-date and accurate. As a retailer, you know how incredibly important it is to stay on top of sales at all times. With pen and paper management, you have to physically be in the store to make sure your data is accurate and up-to-date. But switching to a real-time, cloud-based inventory management system allows you to always know how your business is doing no matter where you are. Considering making the switch to an inventory management solution? Check out our Checklist for a New Inventory Management System.