No matter how you slice it, an SMB can't afford to bleed money. A small business can't afford to pay people who aren't pulling their weight any more than they can afford to buy damaged merchandise or let their stock sit in a warehouse depreciating in value while collecting dust.
Welcome to the future! Times have changed - we have machines to move heavy things, intelligent inventory systems to keep track of our products and supplies, and our offices can be anywhere on the planet with access to Internet. In this fast-paced world of modern business, you have to move quickly if you want to keep up with and surpass your fiercest competition. When evaluating your company's ability to soar with the eagles, here are a few things to take into consideration:
In order to effectively sell your merchandise, you need to know exactly what you have in stock to sell, or else you run the risk of a stock-out or a double sale - the same item being sold twice in separate channels because the inventory management system is not centralized. These will leave you with unhappy customers who are likely to take their business elsewhere. You get one chance to catch and hold your customers' attention - are you using it wisely?
With an optimized inventory management system like erplain, you never need to worry about disappointing your customers, because all sales and inventory information is updated in real time and is always right at your fingertips.
Is your head down, buried in spreadsheets, or is it up and looking to the future? You don't want to order too little and run out too soon, and you don't want to order too much and have your budget eaten up by stock that's sitting there collecting dust, either. How do you make sure you're making the appropriate forecasts?
If you can see at a glance exactly what sold during the same period last year and what didn't, it's easy to cast a solid prognosis of what you'll need to keep your business riding the crest of the wave, with your eyes up to catch every opportunity that comes down the pipe!
Where is your business tied? If it's tied to a desk covered in paper invoices, accounting ledgers and spreadsheets, you're living in the dark ages!
Technology has come a long way in a short amount of time, and these days, it's imperative that the information most critical to your business is accessible 24-7 so you are always ready to support your customers, who rely on you to make sure their own businesses are delivering on the promises they make. The ability to write estimates and invoices on the fly from any device is how smart businesses maintain their edge on competitors.
Without a doubt, the only way to keep an accurate account of business operations is to have many aspects of your business speak to one another without the need for you or your team to waste time counting, double-checking, and manually entering items into spreadsheets.
Imagine only needing to enter things into your system once, then from there, having the ability to track stock, orders, and track payments. All of your platforms, from online point-of-sale to offline, would all be updated in real time and available to you and your squad any time of day or night. This is the reliable convenience of bringing your business operations up to the cloud!
Have you ever experienced a crippling interruption to your cash flow? It's definitely something you don't want to happen because with SMBs, issues like this can be the difference between a company's survival or its untimely ending. Decent companies have lost themselves excellent workers when they've been unable to pay them, and have lost customer bases when they've been unable to fill orders due to the inability to make timely, strategic purchases.
If you're letting your team be bogged down by the arduous task of poring over spreadsheets and writing out manual invoices, you're falling behind. No matter the size of your company, it's never been a better time to optimize your inventory management system and soar above the painfully pedestrian, amateur-hour problems that come from failing to make good use of the tools available to you in the year 2016.
Many SMB owners believe they are justified in delaying their decision to research, find, and install a shiny, newfangled inventory management system because they think they need to be a bigger company with a million SKUs in order to justify its purchase. The truth is, though, making the switch now is inexpensive and easy - plans start at $50/month and you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time! Ask yourself this: how many hours have you and your team spent manually updating your inventory levels lately? And how about manually generating sales orders, estimates, and invoices for each customer with every sale? erplain begins paying for itself the moment it's installed by automating everything for you, and making it all available to you, any time of day or night. Times have changed, and there are great solutions made specifically for SMBs under 10!
Check out erplain.com to see how we can help.
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