Reposted From Intacct's View from the Cloud Blog:
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We recently invited one of Intacct’s Marketplace Partners, QStock Inventory, to share some insights around the topic of inventory management. QStock Inventory extends the native inventory capabilities in Intacct for product-based businesses that have unique needs that may require additional specialized inventory management software. We hope you’ll find this information useful.
Cycle Count vs. Periodic Full Inventory Counts
In the hustle of year end, many of us had an interesting experience that we see over and over again and perceive as normal. Accounting and finance calls and asks for another full inventory count, and has the warehouse take a weekend of overtime to produce a spreadsheet that they email back.
With cloud computing, and all the technology available, many of us are still doing this massive task in an old school way. What hurts more is that some of us end up doing this monthly.
QStock takes advantage of Intacct’s web APIs to keep perpetual inventory, automatically syncing transactions between both systems so your inventory is always up to date.
Inventory is such a large line item on so many balance sheets, but we often take it for granted. Many organizations will run a full inventory count only once a year to make sure their numbers are in line for banks, investors, and taxes. Some do this every month or even every week!
Our greatest assets are swept under a rug so only the warehouse deals with it:
- Finance needs to have a clear view on inventory levels so that they can properly valuate it and communicate it to banks, investors, and for taxes.
- Operations needs to know the quantities so they can get our hands on and ship product, but not only how much they have, but where exactly that product is in the warehouse.
- Purchasing needs to know what they have to coordinate with vendors and pricing to make the best purchasing decisions.
- Sales needs to know what we have so they can offer incentives and quote lead times
- Customer service needs to be able to see what is on the ground, inbound, and promised to support customer requests
- Marketing needs to know what to products to promote and how their promotions are performing based on throughput
Many organizations realize this visibility to inventory is critically important, so they perform what they call “cycle counts,” but in reality are periodic full inventory counts."