Inventory Management for Grocery Stores

Inventory management for grocery stores focuses on keeping a record of the products that the store receives along with the products that the store sells. Returns and shrinkage or spoilage are also considered for proper inventory management.

How Do Grocery Stores Manage Inventory?

Grocery stores keep track of incoming and outgoing products by managing inventory. The outgoing inventory includes sold products, damaged or expired products, and the products lost due to employee theft, shoplifting, cashier errors, etc. Inventory management for grocery stores is essential for accounting purposes, profit calculation, and maintenance of adequate inventory stock.

• Digital Equipment and Inventory Management Software

The inventory management software captures distinct items or stock-keeping units (SKUs) as “inflows” once the store receives them from the warehouse. The barcodes present on all the products (except some small or locally available products) eases the capturing/tracking process. When a customer pays for a product, the quantity is reduced in the records. 

The integration of the cash register with the inventory management system helps keep track of the payments and the inventory stock. The software can either provide a list of the products that need to be restocked or automatically reorder the products that need to be replenished. 

The closing inventory can be calculated once the employees deduct the damaged, lost or expired products. The numbers are compared after doing physical counts to determine the profit or loss incurred by the store.

• Physical Counting

Some stores also rely on inventory management services or their employees for physically counting the inventory on a quarterly, monthly, or yearly basis. Physical counting of inventory by employees can increase the risk of employee theft.

Why Should Grocery Stores Use Software?

High-volume sales and inventory consisting of perishable goods make inventory management for grocery stores a challenging task. Investing in inventory management software like ClearOne helps in easy and error-free inventory management. ClearOne provides facilities like batch-wise/MRP-wise stocking, e-commerce integration, strict control over return items, dead/slow-moving stock reporting and management, bulk updates of rates via excel, and many others. You can fully customise barcode generation and avail several pre-configured templates with thousands of already added stock-keeping units (SKUs) with inventory management software.