How to Organise Business Inventory

If you’re running a business, then you know how tough it is to stay organised, especially if your business is being run from home. Over the pandemic, many home-based businesses cropped up, and now it’s become the norm for people to start out in their homes before growing into something bigger.

Without an intentional organisation strategy, however, you’re going to find it very hard to keep your e-commerce business organised. If you’re already in a warehouse, then you know that warehouse aisles can become cluttered and inventory spaces get chaotic if there’s nothing in place to keep them organised.

While you may not be at a stage where warehouse spaces for rent are on your agenda, you still need a system to stay organised. As a business owner who’s doing an e-commerce business from home, you’re going to be wearing a lot of hats. But instead of spending your day putting out organisational fires, take a look at how you can organise your business inventory better below.

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1. Make receiving easy. Receiving your inventory can be very chaotic, but you can make it more efficient if you are prepared. A lot of the disorganisation begins when you don’t have a place for pallets, or you choose to deal with things later. Instead of doing that, you need to make sure that you’re not cutting corners from the beginning. Your receiving workflow should have a process that is strictly in place from day one, and as soon as your inventory arrives, you have to take the time to properly receive it and put it away correctly. This saves you headaches from day one.
2. Think about your storage capacity. Let’s circle back to the warehouse spaces for rent. If you don’t have enough capacity for your inventory at home and your business is truly growing and spilling out of your spare room, then it’s time to look at your capacity right now and see whether or not a warehouse space could help. You don’t necessarily have to buy a warehouse yourself – you could rent A space. This means you can go for anything small, like the size of a garage, or something even bigger, like the size of an actual warehouse. If you have a limited inventory, you might only need a single shelving unit in your office, but as you grow as a business, an entire warehouse could make all the difference.
3. Install racks and shelving. Once you have your inventory space, it’s time to think about how you’re going to store everything. There should be order to it so you can find the inventory easily, especially if you’re doing things manually at the beginning. Racks and shelving allow you to see what you have in stock at a glance, as long as things are labelled correctly. This will also allow you to reach items quickly when you need to fulfil an order. Remember to keep in mind how much space you do have for racks and shelving before you start going to rent A space elsewhere. You don’t want to take a big leap into growth, which you can’t afford to do both in time and in budget.
4. Label everything. One of the best things that you can do for inventory tracking is to label everything. It may feel like a lot of work, but it’s worth it to take the time to do the work in the long run. Labelling your inventory will help you to stay organised, and it makes it much easier for you to find items when you need them. There are plenty of ways that you can label your inventory, from using actual labelling systems to using colour codes. Using high-quality ASG Services labels (or solutions from similar providers) can make this process even more efficient, providing durable and clearly marked labels that improve organisation and tracking. The system that you choose to use is going to make all the difference to the products that you are selling.
5. Don’t forget your safety stock. Safety stock is the inventory that is kept on hand in case of emergencies. Usually, it’s the inventory that’s needed to fulfil orders to keep production running smoothly. You have to consider how much safety stock you should have because there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It all depends on your business. A good safety stock formula will tell you to have enough inventory to cover two weeks’ worth of demand if there are any supply disruptions. In the event of an emergency, you can use this emergency stock to keep you floating.
6. Automate. A digital inventory management solution is going to help you because it can automate everything in real time. These inventory management solutions can help you track what you’ve got, so you know what you’ve always got in stock. It can also automate a lot of the tedious tasks that are associated with inventory management. You can look at automatic reordering, generating reports and multi-channel support.
7. Keep on top of your inventory levels. You can’t organise anything unless you know how much you’ve got. Once you have your inventory sorted and labelled, you need to see how much you’ve got. So you need to put an alarm system in place to remind you to do this. Small inventories can be physically counted every week. Spreadsheets can help with inventory. Software is the most efficient method of tracking your inventory and knowing what you need to order.
8. Keep your space clean. With regular cleaning and maintenance, your inventory will maintain its organisation. Inventory can easily be stacked on top of other things, and accidents can become hazardous. You can find inventory more easily and prevent it from getting damaged if you have a clean and maintained space. This includes sweeping and mopping the floors of any packaging, wiping down the new surfaces and organising inventory on your shelving.

Tracking your inventory levels is one thing, but keeping on top of your actual storage is quite another. Once you understand exactly what you need to do for your inventory, you’re going to be able to manage your business far more effectively. 

This is a collaborative post.