Every year I see newsagents bring in a stocktaker who does a great job counting and valuing stock but who adds nothing to the business operationally.
A stocktake is less about the value of the stock than about getting accurate data on which to base smarter business decisions.
Using newsagency software, newsagents can do the stocktake themselves. It will save time and money. Plus you will be able to:
- Automate stock reordering.
- Do rolling stock takes and end the need for an annual count.
- More easily track what is being stolen.
- More quickly identify under-performing stock.
- More easily compare supplier performance.
- Delegate stock management to team members in the business.
The benefits are there for the taking – get started by using your newsagency software. I urge newsagents to talk to their software company about it. My software company is running rolling free training workshops for interested newsagents. Others are welcome to promote their training opportunities here too. We all need to help lift the efficiency of this channel.
Don’t do a manual stock take in 2013 it’s a wasted investment.
We do our own stock take each quarter with our tower system. we have it down to a fine art now, it doesn’t take much time or disturbance.
we had a stocktaker come in when we bought the shop and it was an inaccurate guess of costs on a lot of products.
We have just completed our stocktake for this year and will just do some smaller department stocktakes closer to June 30 just to check things. It is really quite easy, we log in with a laptop and just move around the shop scanning and counting, little disturbance and all done in business hours with 1 extra staff member. Agree about stock taker it really is only a snapshot for that day. The reordering benefits are huge and whenever a rep comes near us we have accurate sales to data, no guessing!!
We have been stocktaking off the POS system for three years now, saved $1000s in stocktaking fees and we can ask the POS real questions and get real answers, win, win.
Good little stocktaking debate.
Just to put the Stocktakers perspective on things, a good stocktaker should always be accurate ( sorry to hear Peter’s stocktaker wasnt) plus of course a stocktaker saves you the time and stress of doing the stocktake yourself.
JR good software used properly will be accurate plus it will help retailers more carefully track shrinkage.
It still amazes me that some stores don’t use automatic ordering! Its been around for years in most major POS systems.
Its not just the newsagency industry that has a lack of stores using it (what % of stores would you estimate use it Mark?) – the supermarket industry only has a minority of operators that use the feature. Even big operators like the Ritchies group only began implementing it about 2 years ago.
Why do so many independent retailers fear automatic ordering?
The difficulty task is after stocktake, how we analyize the stock discrepancy, verfiy the stock, and adjust the stock level.
We do a stocktake on bus tickets and cigarettes every week before ordering.
The PDEs can not provide real time figures, therefore, the procedures is
1) COMPASION OF Stock level on hand in computer, and in the PDEs
2) adjust Qty in the PDEs by subtracting the Qty of stock sold after the stock is counted
3) re-count the stock and found why there still a discrepency.
4) Adjust the stock level, write off any missing stocks
POS are not always smart enough to transform the carton Qty into single SKU Qty, therefore, we also need manually do so.
Jarryd, the problem with automatic ordering is that
1. not every department has regular stock taking,
2. not every suppliers provide accurate stock file,
3. not every POS supplier provide arrival utility to compare the stock in ddo files and the scanning result of stock incoming
4. not every product has the barcode and the Carton/single SKU relationship being setup, therefore, scanning in Carton Qty need to manually adjusted
5. not every POS supplier provide ordering utility for dupicate SKUs with same product code.
I spent last 12 months, try to scan everything in stock, setup Carton/Single SKU relationship, elimate dupicate SKUs, create barcodes for every non-barcoded stock items. and make many mistakes from automatic ordering.
Lucky the suppliers are very helpful and most of time, they kindly exchange stocks. They also update their program to generate better ddo file whenever a bug is reported.
I should work in your store one day to learn the procudures and practices from your operation.
Sunny,
I will admit that the auto ordering features in the major supermarket POS systems are a little more advanced than those in newsagency systems (in some respects).
We do get real-time stock figures in our PDE. This might be something to ask for from Tower through the suggestion section on their customer site.
To put our operation in context
– we have over 5000 products on automatic ordering
– we do a full stocktake only once a year.
– the electronic invoices we receive from our supermarket warehouse are accurate in terms of matching up with our product file.
– the incorrect pick rate of our warehouse is hopeless, but we’re waiting on a feature to accurately compare stock we have actually received (through scanning each carton) to the stock we have been invoiced for. The only way we combat this is to use the PDE to check low and out of stock products on the shelf to see if we should have received them.
– the stock file and product setup from our warehouse is very accurate (and managed in a much better way than In the newsagency industry)
– we have to manually enter most invoices from smaller suppliers because most supermarket POS systems are not setup to accept anything but the proprietary electronic files from our warehouse.
Jarryd , is your business a newsagency or a supermarket ?
Both shauns. We’re branded as a FoodWorks Supermarket and a newsXpress newsagency.
The store is split in two. Newsagency and checkout at the front (just under 1/3 of floor space) and supermarket at the rear.