Running your inventory reports: what you need to know

Inventory reporting is an important element of inventory management. Its purpose is to review your existing stock. Your reports summarise your stock levels, sales data, and more, to give you crucial information about your inventory. Inventory reports come in many forms- you can learn about the different types here*.

When it comes to inventory businesses, things can easily get complicated. Inventory reporting allows you to keep a clear overview of what’s happening, so that are equipped to make informed and smart decisions when it comes to your inventory.

Let’s take a look at what you need to know about inventory reporting.

What you need to establish before creating inventory report

There are several things you need to consider before running your inventory report to make sure things run smoothly.

Outline KPIs: To make sure your reports are useful, it’s vital to know what you’re measuring, so before you start, settle on the key performance indicators you’ll be reporting on.

Review your IM software: To produce quality reports, you need a great inventory management system which is easy to use and easy to integrate across your systems. A quality inventory management software will make sure the data you are reporting on is accurate and up to date.

Create a list of inventories: To build your reports, you first need to gather crucial basic information in the form of a list of inventories. You should include information on your units and their locations, as well as prices and SKU numbers. With a good inventory management software, it should be simple to export a list of your items.

Determine the timeframe: Your reports will be ineffective if you haven’t nominated a dedicated timeframe to report on. Pull all metrics from a specific chosen time frame, ensure you’re comparing data from the same slot of time.

How regularly do you need to generate them?

The short answer: regularly. How often you should produce reports will vary from business to business, but as a rule of thumb, a report every week and every month is good practice. Take advantage of your inventory management system by pulling data to produce weekly and monthly reports.

It’s important to make use of inventory reports over busy periods. You should generate a report after every known busy period, like Christmas. This lets you compare against previous busy periods, so you can build a picture of your inventory year on year.

Inventory reports are great business practice and can provide you with clear and regular oversight of your inventory- crucial for informing important business decisions.

Workhorse’s inventory management software provides small businesses with a transformative system to gather and track inventory data, and keep inventory organised. To find out more about how Workhorse could transform your business, learn about what we do.