Inventory Management Vs Accounting

Bigfoot,

Inventory management and accounting are two separate business tasks.

There is comprehensive software that will help you address both disciplines, but typically they are thought of as different "animals."

Inventory management might be needed if you sell lots of physical goods, especially if you have multiple products from multiple vendors and are selling on multiple sites. If you just sell a few items a week (for instance) you can manage keeping track of inventory with a simple spreadsheet.

So the decision has to be yours. I would say that if you have trouble keeping track of your inventory or if delivering your goods is becoming a nightmare, you're probably at the point of needing some inventory management help.

Steve

Accounting and inventory management are different... but related.

In a nutshell, accounting is about "keeping score" of your sales, expenses, and profits.

Inventory management, however, is about "strategy." It's more than just knowing how much you have in stock.

The real value lies in controlling your inventory. It will help you determine your "optimal" inventory levels.

That's the principle behind "Just In Time" inventory management. It helps keep your inventory levels (and costs) at the most efficient levels.

For example...

What very frequently happens in business is that the owner buys too much inventory. However, if those products suddenly stop selling, you'll end up liquidating them at a LOSS. By managing your inventory levels, you can minimize this risk.

Inventory management also helps you spot opportunity.

For example...

If a product sells well -- but is in short supply -- buying a larger quantity can boost your profits. This is because, at some point, you could end up being the only one with the product in stock.

In addition, buying a larger quantity can often also get you a discounted price.

Proper inventory management helps you make these decisions so you can control your cash, minimize your required inventory, stock what sells, and maximize your profits... while lowering risk.

John

Really like what Johnny 12345 and Steve B said -very clear, and good advice. I work for ecomdash, a multichannel inventory management tool, and we really built ourselves around the goal of helping small businesses. We automatically update your inventory everywhere in real time, pull in sales orders, and alert you when an item is running low (you set the low threshold). We're priced at 49.99/mo for up to 500 sales order/mo. But, we don't integrate with Craigslist...so we may not be the optimal solution for you? Since you sell on Amazon, I would check their Third Party Forum in the Seller Forums. You should find some good software suggestions there. Good luck!

Tiana with ecomdash

In the end it is all the same, just the scale of how you do it and how much revenue you make for the amount of effort you put in. You are referring to multichannel - selling the same products across multiple marketplaces and environments - it is something we are moving in to. At the highest level you have ERP (sales, inventory, warehousing, financials), then MDM (product management), CRM (customer management), BI (analytics), ETL (connecting it all together).

So our problem was that we are looking to launch a 180+ country store across all channels with dynamic multi-national pricing using large enterprise processes (to reduce effort) but available to a startup. As you get to the smaller businesses all the pieces get split out and you need to integrate them yourself - an online multi-channel environment is just a cut-down erp which is pre-configured - the more cut-down it is the more effort you have to put in to make the processes work.

So it looks like we found our solution, but many companies happily run in Excel for financials. An eCommerce platform is bascially just a very small ERP & MDM with graphical frontend. You could for example run Magento and use m2ePro to sync (ETL), more or less the same thing.