3 Easy Effective Stocktaking Tricks They Don’t Want You to Know
Stocktaking is an important aspect of inventory management for your pharmacy or patent medicine business. It involves counting and checking all your medicines, sundries and other products at intervals (e.g. monthly). By taking stock of your inventory regularly, you can see what you’ve sold and what you haven’t. You can also prevent pilfering and identify damaged or expired goods easily. Stocktaking helps you keep proper records by allowing you to match the records in the system with the products on the shelf. By giving you an accurate assessment of inventory, stocktaking makes you more efficient and helps you serve customers better.
Importance of stocktaking
Regular stocktaking can help you;
- Discover stock issues, which can include:
- Stolen stock
- Misplaced stock
- Damaged stock
- Slow-moving stock.
2. Ensure your business is meeting targets: a good understanding of your stock shows whether you are meeting up with the targets you have set for your business.
3. Increase profits by reducing losses due to expired stock.
4. Review prices as you physically assess your products.
5. Monitor inventory, minimize waste and discover theft or damage.
6. Find out what’s needed and ensure that you make the right orders at the right time.
Despite these benefits of stocktaking, pharmacists complain it is tedious. So, we are going to explore 3 easy, effective stocktaking methods in this article. Keep reading to learn more.
3 Easy Effective Stocktaking Tricks
- The basics
Simple things like getting all you need before the stocktake day (usually the last day of the month for most pharmacies and patent medicine businesses) will save you lots of stress. You don’t want to leave something out only to find out on the D day. That will put you in a disarray!
Make provision for things like:
- Stock sheets
- Pens
- Calculator
or
- A stocktaking software
If you haven’t already, consider downloading stocktaking software. A stocktaking software like Remedial Rx makes it easier for you to monitor your inventory and keep stock records securely.
2. Get your staff involved
It may tempt you to do all the work yourself because you want to be thorough. But that will only make things a lot more difficult for you and cut down the time you should spend counselling patients. Instead of doing that, train your staff to take stock too to speed up the process. To make sure there’s no mixup, you can assign different staff members to different shelves. You can also find a way to clearly mark items that have been counted, to avoid double counting.
Here are ways to ensure that all your staff are involved, you can:
- Organize teams
- Allocate supervisors to each team
- Formulate a counting procedure to be adopted by the teams.
- Adding snacks to make it more exciting.
3. Properly value your stock
After counting and verifying stock levels, review your price lists to ensure you have the most up-to-date prices for the stocktake and that all recent price changes have been considered.
To accurate and properly value stocks, you can
- Double-check
- Assign clear labels
Once the stock has been counted correctly, make the most of the information. Review the results of the stocktake to know where your inventory management needs improvements (which p[roducts you should order more frequently, or stockless and so on). Note thefts, damages, expiry and make plans to minimize them. You can also take advantage of Remedial Health’s “Pay only what you dispense” to prevent tying cash down on slow-moving stocks.
Conclusion
Stocktaking is essential for good stock management. A good stock management process will improve customer retention, help you avoid unnecessary purchases, and boost profits. It will also help you make better decisions and avoid losses because of waste and expiry. Stocktaking demands a lot of attention and effort, however, but because it is an important aspect of inventory management with lots of benefits too, you can’t run from it. These tricks discussed above will make stocktaking easier and a lot more exciting for you and your team. To learn more about how we help you grow your pharmacy or patent medicine business, contact us today.
