Inventory management software helps you keep track of your inventory right from your manufacturer to point of the actual sale. As the majority of the business’s cash is tied up on inventory, it is crucial it runs like clockwork to keep profit margins healthy.
These tools are designed to fix the bottlenecks involved in warehousing and simplify complex processes along with automating the supervision of products. They help businesses to track sales, purchase orders, order fulfillment, and stock levels to keep things going seamlessly.
Like any other maintenance scheduling software or ERP solution, it provides you with a 360-degree view of the operations that are getting performed. Moreover, they allow you to make better decisions ultimately giving you an edge over the other competitors.
In this guide, I have ranked and reviewed the best inventory management software based on its pricing, features, support, ease of use, product tracking capabilities, and more.
So let’s get started.
What Are The Best Inventory Management Software?
Here is my list for the best inventory management software you can check out this year:
1. Quickbooks Inventory Management Software
QuickBooks inventory management is an end-to-end accounting solution designed to grow alongside small businesses. This software provides tools for managing inventory, tracking sales, generating reports, and running payrolls. QuickBooks inventory management software also brings forth industry-specific solutions for contractors, retail, wholesale and manufacturing, and nonprofit organizations.
The Quickbooks Inventory enables the users to control each member’s access to information. That includes the user’s individual roles and permissions to ensure that every user has access to the data they need while the sensitive information remains hidden. The users can scan barcodes when picking or acquiring inventory.
Quickbooks Inventory Management Software has proven over the years its capability for small and midsize businesses. Its advanced accounting tools and features serve all the needs of your small business’s logistics. It gives your business an advantage to save tens of thousands of dollars.
Key Features
- Industry-specific solution – Enterprise offers a variety of industry-specific solutions for contracting, manufacturing & wholesale. Additionally, retail and professional services are loaded with special features and reports.
- QuickBooks Enterprises’ Advanced Inventory – This allows consumers to track records across multiple locations, from bin to sale, with mobile barcode scanning.
- Centralized dashboard – This enables the authority of picking, packing, and shipping workflows from within a singular dashboard.
- Access Control – Individual user roles and permits can be set for over 115 different activities, securing that all team members are given access to the data they require while the rest is kept private.
- Advanced Reporting – This allows consumers to create customizable reports using industry-specific template bundles. Those which are automatically filled with company data to reduce manual data entry errors.
Pros
- Gain efficiencies in your inventory and order management processes – Always observe what’s in stock, what’s in sequence, where each item is located, and what it’s all worth so you can make real-time business decisions.
- Set more accurate delivery dates – Keep consumers happy with effective, accurate order fulfillment. Set practical delivery expectations with real-time inventory information at your fingertips.
- Simplify Warehouse management – Efficiently transfer inventory between locations. Use consecutive and parcel numbers to manage inventory, warranty claims, or track defects.
- Automate order management – This enables you to fulfill sales orders and prioritize the most significant orders – and check the status in real-time. You can create custom pick lists to be built by warehouse workers in multiple locations.
- Barcode scanning – You can improve efficiency by scanning items from your mobile device and automatically syncing with QuickBooks, making it easier to market your stock.
- Track inventory costs your way – You can accurately track product prices the way you want to with automated processes that save you time and effort.
Pricing Plans
Quickbooks Inventory Management software offers a free 30-day trial for you to try their software for your business. Small businesses can subscribe to their software for $69 per month. For midsize businesses, they have an offer for $99 per month.
2. Zoho Inventory
Zoho Inventory is a cloud-based inventory management software that helps you keep track of the movement of the stock. You can integrate your business with online sales channels like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy, as well as shopping carts like Shopify and many more.
With multi-channel selling and powerful inventory control, you can now optimize your inventory and order administration, right from purchase to packing, to payments. It is best for e-commerce businesses, online sellers, retailers, and wholesalers.
You can maintain perfect control over every unit of your stock with the Zoho compact inventory app. Additionally, with workflow automation and end-to-end order, fulfillment features to optimize your operations. You will never have to check another box on a clipboard again.
Key Features
- Stay updated on your stock levels at all times – You can get instant updates on your inventory levels and get notified whenever your stock goes below the re-order level.
- A centralized inventory system for multiple online stores – You can automatically update your inventory quantities across all your selling channels whenever a sale is made.
- Integrate with shipping carriers, payment gateways, and much more – You get an automated entire sales process, from creating sales orders and shipping the products to tracking the delivery status and sending invoices to your customers.
Pros
- Order Management – Zoho Inventory provides an order management system that helps you handle all your sales and purchase activities, invoices, and bills. You can monitor packages and shipments to keep all your deliveries on track.
- Warehouse Management – You can control your stock in different warehouses centrally from Zoho inventory. The movements of your parcel and items transferred within warehouses could be pursued.
- Integrations – You can sell on the biggest marketplaces like Etsy and Shopify. Integrate with Zoho CRM and Zoho Books, and receive payments online via Razorpay or Paypal.
- Reports – You can keep a record of inventory aging, vendor payments, sales details, and inventory estimate from a variety of reports. These reports can be generated, downloaded, and shared easily.
Pricing Plans
Zoho integration software offers both a free trial and a free version. You can avail a free 14-day trial. If you opt for the free version, you are entitled to up to 50 orders and 50 shipments per month.
The Standard version costs $59 per month, permitting the businesses to have 1500 orders and shipments per month. The professional version costs $99 per month, granting the businesses 7500 orders and shipments per month.
The Premium version costs $159 per month, granting the businesses 15000 orders and shipments per month. The Elite version costs $239 per month, authorizing businesses with unlimited orders and shipments per month.
3. ChannelAdvisor
ChannelAdvisor is and has been the industry’s most trusted e-commerce solution. It helps global brands and retailers solve their marketplaces, direct-to-consumer, digital marketing, drop-ship, and fulfillment needs. ChannelAdvisor provides everything that your business requires to connect with customers and increase sales.
For decades, ChannelAdvisor has supported labels and retailers worldwide to improve their online presence. This is done by expanding sales channels and connecting with consumers around the world. Additionally, they optimize their operations for peak performance, rendering actionable analytics to improve competitiveness.
ChannelAdvisors are best for retailers and labels looking to engage with their consumers across their buyer’s journey and expand their reach. The technology is combined with a team of e-commerce experts, assisting you to streamline and optimize advertising campaigns.
Key Features
- Global Marketplace Integrations – You can integrate your business with leading marketplaces like Amazon and increase sales opportunities.
- Consolidated Inventory management – You can reduce the possibilities of overselling by synchronizing inventory.
- Marketing Optimization – This allows you to stay with current trends and optimize your product data with marketplace content requirements.
Pros
- Scale your business – The platform allows you to upgrade your business with ease without building new integrations.
- Save time – You can reduce loads of your internal teams by automating time-consuming tasks from marketplaces, and web stores.
- Increase product visibility – You can effectively manage your ad spend by leveraging Amazon Advertising and more from within the platform.
Pricing Plans
ChannelAdvisor does not provide any free trial. They take 0.5% to 4% of your revenue with a minimum of $1,000 per month.
So now let’s cover the basics.
What is Inventory Management Software?
Inventory management software is an online application that allows your business to manage and track the inflow and outflow of products from manufacturers to stores to end sales points. Moreover, they help in maintaining processes such as fulfillment, accounting, invoicing, tracking shipments, making reports, and more.
Another major advantage of using inventory management tools is that they track the price change in products. This helps you in understanding whether the price was too high or too low for a certain period. Additionally, it also helps track lost or stolen products from your warehouse.
It ensures that no demanding product of your business goes out of stock. Therefore, investing in an inventory management tool is always a wise decision no matter what other people say.
What features should You Look for in an Inventory System?
Here are some of the standard features you should look for in inventory management software before purchasing.
1. Multi-Location Access
If your business owns multiple warehouses or plans to expand the number of warehouses in the future then multiple location support is crucial. A manual inventory management tool that can optimize inventory from various different locations at the same time.
However, customer support becomes a crucial element here before you invest a lot of bucks into any inventory management app.
2. Ease of Use
Inventory management systems deliver advantages only when it is easy to work with them. Looking for a tool that is easy for staff to understand and involves less hassle in the future should be your priority.
Make sure that the software functionality aligns with your business requirement and employee count. Also, ensure that the tool provides advanced workflow automation to make warehouse transactions faster.
3. Analytics and Reports
Data analytics is one of the important features of a good inventory management system. Not only does it provide a depth analysis of products and warehouse stock but also tracks its consumption.
Warehouse utilization provides critical information on how your money is getting utilized and what can be done to improve it. Gone are the days of manual inspection and multiple spreadsheet data to decide what to do.
4. Training and Customer Service
There is no use of inventory software if your staff does not know how to operate it. Therefore, it is essential the tool provides quality customer support on issues faced by them.
Moreover, if there are any major updates then provide the relevant documentation and other helpful resources to use those features. This will help your business to fully leverage inventory management features.
5. Third-Party Integration
If you are a business then you generally rely on multiple software to conduct your daily affairs. Therefore, it is crucial to choose software that integrates with services such as accounting tools, inventory data, asset management apps, staffing tools, and more.
Today or tomorrow you will definitely need these tools to increase your warehouse productivity.
6. Currency Conversion Rate
If your business relies on imports and you have various suppliers other than China then this is the feature you might have to look for. The currency conversion rate might help you to determine from which country manufacturer you should import the product.
Taking advantage of currency conversion can help you get better price contracts from the manufacturers thus contributing to some profits.
Best Inventory Management Software – Final Summary
This wraps up my list of the best inventory management software you can use for your business. I will keep updating the list with other good inventory management tools available in the market.
Remember that the best inventory management platforms are designed to take care of your products right from manufacturers to retail store warehouses. Also, they provide control regardless it is a retail store or an eCommerce business.
However, the choice of the best inventory management tool will depend on your budget, business requirements, team size, and more. Do your research thoroughly and go through every option at least once before making the final decision.
Which of these inventory management tools are you planning to use? Do you like any one of them? Let me know in the comment section below.
More from Smashitbuck: Do check out my other articles on the Gmail plugins, sentence grammar check, and youtube converter to read this year.
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