An Inconvenient Truth Behind Excel Inventory Management

It is not an understatement to say that product warehouse management lies at the heart of an efficient business model.  While it may seem obvious, it is essential to manage your inventory for seamless operation.  Hospitals, shopping malls, and fitness clubs are just a few of many businesses that directly benefit from efficient inventory management.

There are various solutions available to manage inventory, but many people still express the difficulty and confusion that often accompany inventory management.

Manual Inventory Management

Manual inventory management is quite archaic on the surface.  However, some still opt for checking the characteristics of each product, counting and recording quantity manually: mainly because of the low budget and annoyance of another training session for inventory management.

Excel Inventory Management

Excel workbooks are commonly used for inventory management and various excel templates are readily available online.  There are plenty of services that also provide visualization features by importing excel with inventory data.  However, these websites or companies offer services limited to users who are already familiar with Excel or have advanced program knowledge.

What Are The Must-Have Key Features of Inventory Management Solution?

Ease of use must accompany any inventory management solution. It is definitely not easy finding a one-size-fits-all solution for different work environments or business characteristics, but the conditions mentioned below should be satisfied at a minimum.

Ease of Use

Ease of data entry of inventory information such as each stock-in and stock-out transaction and product specification would reduce time, effort, and the frequency of errors.

Access to Live Inventory Data Anywhere, Anytime

Even if you spend countless hours, effort, and money in inventory management, all is a lost cause if you can’t access the data easily. You need a platform that guarantees easy access to live inventory data and input warehouse orders at your convenience regardless of location or time.

Transparency of Inventory Management

Say someone could either intentionally or mistakenly alter inventory data within the inventory management solution you recently implemented for your business. Could you trust the solution and continue to use it?

BoxHero offers easy, transparent management of your inventory.

Once you input the product specification and record whether you made a stock-in or stock-out, BoxHero can do the rest of the inventory management for your business. You, as a business owner, can then spend the valuable time saved with BoxHero on growing your business or carrying on the important tasks that really matter to your business.

1. Simplified System Managing Stock-In & Out Activities

Utilize BoxHero’s simple stock-in/out entry function. After you register your products by using their properties and images, you can manage the inventory without errors or mistakes, and can easily access the real-time status of countless product inventories.

Have too many products to manage? The barcode scan function can help you locate the exact product you want with a single click. With the BoxHero mobile app, you won’t need a separate scanning device to utilize the barcode scan functionality.  No barcode on the product?  BoxHero can generate product barcodes with a single click.

2. Increasing Work Efficiency with Collaboration

BoxHero provides functions that support real-time inventory management collaboration. You can set varying access levels for multiple members of your team to drive work efficiency. You and your team can manage the inventory anywhere and anytime.  Better yet, BoxHero’s user-friendly features make it a breeze to use for everyone in your team, from managers to team members, without lengthy, hard training.

3. Reducing Mistakes and Increasing Accuracy

If you input the product stock-in/out data correctly, BoxHero can automatically organize all the inventory transaction history. You can verify pending orders, and quickly analyze changes in each product’s inventory level to minimize unexpected shortages that ultimately impact the business profit.

In addition, whenever a transaction occurs, the transparent history is automatically updated on the BoxHero app.  This automation feature eliminates human errors, and you can easily correct any discrepancies in data entry. BoxHero allows you to sort the inventory history by the users or types of transactions. The original inventory transactional data are automatically backed up to the system so you can recover them if necessary.

4. Transfering Excel File to BoxHero with Ease

BoxHero supports mass recording of inventory transactions by importing & exporting Excel files.  For example, if you manage an e-commerce website, you can download all your products' orders and shipping history in Excel and transfer data to BoxHero all at once.

5. Using BoxHero Anywhere, Anytime

BoxHero supports mobile and PC versions and allows for seamless inventory management whether you’re in the office or on-site. When you’re out on-site, you can check the real-time inventory data with a barcode scan via an in-app camera. When in an office, you can quickly monitor stock level and inventory stocktaking simultaneously.  Data entered on-site are shared in real-time with the team members off-site so there is no need to double-check the data when preparing business analysis, or inventory reports.