Looking for best inventory control system for my situation…..?

Looking for best inventory control system for my situation…..?
I have a small poster selling business with posters in three locations. I am looking for a cost effective solution, hopefully under 0. to be able to add or use current barcodes on the posters and go back to the places once a month, scan the remaining posters, and see what has sold.

I may have the same poster at all three locations or just one location depending on the title and can have from 1-20 of the same poster in stock.

for the past couple years I have used excel spreadsheets, but this is becoming too time consuming as I add titles and locations.

All of the software programs I have tried in this range do not seem to help with the hard count of stock once a month. Since I do not own the stores the posters are sold in I am unable to check them out as sold. So I must be able to just go in and do a scan of the remaining products to know what has sold.

Inflow inventory seems to be the closest one so far, but the only way I think it may be able to work is to do a transfer of stock when I do the monthly scan and whichever ones do not come up to transfer are the ones that have sold…. Not sure if I will be able to move the remaining to a purchase ticket to show them as being sold in the previous month.. I have just ordered a barcode scanner to see if this will be possible.

Any ideas would be helpful!

Thanks in advance.

Best answer:

First setup a system and don’t worry about adopting barcodes and scanning until your system is working.

A basic inventory control system can be built using an inventory card system with one card per barcoded item. (With computers we use a spread sheet for each unique inventory item.) When you take inventory you record the date and the quantity on hand and the sales (last period inventory – current inventory).

Since you doing this for 3 locations you will want 9 columns; one for the date and for each location one for inventory and one for sales during the period. Use the remaining two columns to record total inventory and total sales.

You should be able to get some sample programs from the maker of your barcode scanner including one which will calculate the quantity on hand for each bar code and record the information in a file that can be read by a spread sheet program. You can then copy it — by hand if necessary — to your inventory card spread sheets.

By having the information for each item on a separate spread sheet you will have a sales history for each item in each location on one screen (or piece of paper if you print them out).

Hope this helps
Jerry-the-bookkeeper

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