In retail management when it comes to stock, the more money tied up in stock means less money available for other purposes and/or more bank interest.
However, what it is, is a part of a much bigger problem the carrying cost. These would include beside the interest an almost an endless list of items such as rental on more retail and storage space, more insurance, more handling costs, more accounting, more shoplifting (shoplifting is now Australia's biggest crime estimated at over two billion dollars a year) and obsolescence costs. As a general rule, the carry cost is said to be about 20%. That is an average figure many items are higher.
So a business with a $100,000 of excess stock, has an extra cost of about $20,000 a year and unless this problem is addressed this cost will continue forever and ultimately affect the value of the business.
Our point of sale runs a perpetual inventory so it has the tools to address this problem. It also runs a comparision to the focus, an advanced statistical measure of what your ideal stock level of an item should be.
To make it work, you need to do a stocktake. To help you, we have updated the help documents in our point of sale's help files so press F1 while in the register and check them out.
There are four documents:
Stocktake = Standard stock take doc using Posbrowser on its own to run the stock take.
Stocktake with a PTD = Stocktaking with the help of a PDT
Stock take with the stock management system = Stocktaking using the mobile PDA browser program.
And if you are coming from another software to our software
3rd Party Stocktake guide = A guide on how to upload stocktake data to and from another program.
A reduction of 30% of the overstock figure will on a $100,000 save you a carry cost of $6,000 every year.
