Welcome back to our Inventory Management Features blog series! In this post, we will take a look at “Cycle Count“, what it means, benefits, and how it should work as a feature of your IMS.
Cycle Count
If you’re involved with managing inventory on a regular basis, you may already know what Cycle Count is. In simpler terms, it refers to an audit practice of checking the inventory levels on a continued schedule. However, cycle counts are usually limited to a part of the total inventory in order to avoid disruption to your operations.
Cycle Counts may be performed on daily, weekly, or monthly basis, depending on the scale of inventory and the organization needs. In fact, a higher frequency can help you achieve higher accuracy.
Benefits
Why should you conduct cycle counts is quite simple:
- You will most definitely enjoy a higher degree of accuracy in your inventory level
- Better visibility of your items will allow for improved business decisions – you don’t oversell or undersell
- If you can identify differences in your stock levels early on, you can solve these issues in time and not incur expenses later on.
- Adopting the cycle count method can be less costly as you only deal with a subset of your inventory
Cycle Count in an IMS
An Inventory Management System should allow you to perform cycle counts whenever you want.
Real-time information: It is important that your IMS can provide relevant information for your items like item number, quantity and location in real-time. Information accuracy is important to achieve inventory accuracy.
Mobile Access: Ideally, your IMS offers a mobile app which you can use to scan inventory items and input their quantity to perform cycle counts. If not, integrating with your barcode scanners is a feature to look out for.
Flexibility: Let’s say you deal with a vendor or a consignee. Your IMS must offer flexibility to give them relevant access into the stock levels to perform cycle count and make changes, if needed.
With Clear Spider, performing cycle count is very easy. You can simply scan the items, update information in real-time and the system will make the necessary adjustments for you. Moreover, you can associate the correction with a shrinkage, a counting mistake or regular audit, whatever is apt. This will be helpful as it gives you insights into your business operations.
In conclusion, cycle counts are an effective way to capture and monitor results on a frequent basis. If done right, you can easily improve the accuracy of stock levels as well as financial reporting.
