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Do I really need Inventory Control with my Software ?
The majority of Small Businesses really do not need any form of inventory control. However, Inventory is obviously essential for retail shops, large manufacturing plants, store warehouses etc...
However does the local carpenter really need to account for a box of nails, or if you are a hair dresser do you really want to account for all your bottles of shampoo..
A lot of old fashioned bookkeepers and some accountants will insist that inventory control is essential for small business. However in the end if you do not really need inventory control then you will end up wasting hours and hours of accounting time just for a small array of materials.
Most of the small business people I have known over a great many years prefer do regular manual checks maybe once a week, and this is usually sufficient for their businesses.
However, if you are a hairdresser for example and you need an accurate record of essential items such as shampoo, you do not want to run out when the client is in the chair, so you need to at least keep a manual tally of the amount of inventory you have.
Maybe all you would need in this case is a simple check list pinned to your wall, where you can update as you open a new bottle etc...
You will find that accounting software which includes inventory also includes bank accounts and such. They then make it almost impossible not to use it all of these processes as they expect that you will always be needing them, so everything to interconnected with each other.
So if you want to perform a simple transaction through the books, such as a small cash transaction which should only consist of one single entry, you cant. As you will then also need to adjust the inventory and bank accounts etc....
In the end you waste hours and hours each week for what ? Something that you could have handed in 15min by performing a manual check...
Of course if you have 100's of items that are essential to your business, which you cannot afford to run out of, then you will need good inventory control.
Inventory Control and TaxGst
If you do need Software to perform things like inventory control we are sorry to inform you that TaxGst does cater for this area of accounting.
What if you need Software for Inventory Control ?
You have two choices.
If you need inventory control then you need to consider if you really want to combine the both processes or if you could achieve the same result by using two separate programs.
Obviously if you are a shop with 1000's of items then you want your inventory and your accounts to automatically link.
But if you run a small business from home and you have a hundred or so items that you simple want to manage so you know how many you have then you may achieve this easier with a separate program built for this purpose.
In the end its up to you, and because we do not allow for inventory in our software we are the last people who should be giving you advice if you need inventory control.
But one thing is for certain, if you need inventory control then shop around.. Trial more than one program and where possible try to break them up into separate programs as mentioned above.
Because we do know this, we know that there are hundreds of programs on the market and there are hundreds of programs that are going to waste hundreds of hours of your time because they are so ill equipped to deal with these functions in a simple and easy manner..
Which is why we say that you should trial several over a period of time so you can find the best one. It may seem like a waste of time and a huge effort but in the long term it could save you hundreds, if not thousands of hours.
The last thing you need in your life is to be stuck with a program that causes you to perform 8 different tasks just to get one simple result, when another could have achieved it in 1 or 2 steps.
If you think I am being overly critical, have a look out there and you will see what we mean.