How To Simplify Your Business’ Asset Stocktaking System

If you own a business, you know that keeping track of stock, equipment, parts and inventory, while practical, can be a real tedious chore.

Even though having an accurate count and understanding of all of your assets is important, it can involve hours of ongoing manual time and effort, and without the right stocktaking system in place, errors can occur frequently.

Fortunately, today’s asset management technology has made stocktaking so much easier and faster for businesses like yours.

What happens during stocktaking?

Stocktaking is more than just checking boxes, tallying the quantity and calling it a day.

The purpose of stocktaking is about recording the amount and location of stock held for inventory control purposes. By having accurate transparency over all of your current assets, your business can make more informed decisions to help increase sales, gain project efficiencies, manage depreciation and mitigate losses.

Stocktaking is important because it allows you to:

• Determine what equipment and tools are most useful
• Evaluate stock levels and make an accurate assessment on what to order
• Calculate the cost of stocks to purchase and what price to sell or rent at
• Identify damaged, expired or perishable goods
• Monitor levels and the avoidance of inventory theft
• Have greater control over project management and asset allocations

And the list goes on.

How to perform a stocktake

It’s important to create an organised stocktaking process to help you plan, follow a schedule and avoid mistakes.

Businesses have a few common stocktaking methods, depending on what industry they are in and what they need. The most common are:

Occurs once a year where records are taken at one time and may require the business premises to close.

The stocktake is performed at different times throughout the year to maintain updated information about stock and asset leve

Occurs periodically or at the end of an accounting period for tax purposes.

Typically conducted to check discrepancies with physical stock.

This is when stock levels are at an unusual or unexpected level, and a business proactively takes steps to uncover why this is happening and to prevent a recurrence.

While these methods are certainly helpful for a business, they are often slow and vulnerable to human error, making manual asset stocktaking inefficient. Often, they also require a lot of work, and that means appointing more people and investing more time, money and resources to accomplish.

However, with Asset Management Software, you can avoid this completely and experience many benefits that traditional stocktaking approaches simply cannot provide. 

With the help of stocktaking technology, asset inventory reporting has been made easier for businesses. EROAD’s Asset Management Software stores all of your equipment, tools, machinery and vehicle data in the cloud by simply attaching concealed tags on each of your items. 

The item description, cost, quantity, location and other essential information is recorded and can be easily accessed via your live asset dashboard. Using this will enable you to check your asset types and quantity, anywhere, at any time, meaning you always have an accurate count so you can assign them to projects as needed.

By using asset management software for stocktaking, you will also have: 

• An increased understanding of your business and its assets
• Improvements in your ability to deliver great customer service
• Real-time alerts of discrepancies and issues
• The ability to make informed decisions based on accurate data
• Reduced costs, wastage and excess labour
• An increase in overall project productivity
• Advanced measurement and comparison capabilities