It’s been called “a necessary evil”. Employees don’t like it, management doesn’t like it. Talk about boring! Who wants to count every single item in an entire store?
Yet it’s a reality that every business faces, usually at year’s end.
It means everyone either has to get up exceptionally early to get to work well before the doors open for business, or have to stay at work until very late into the night. The lure of coffee & donuts (in the morning) or pizza (in the evening) only goes so far.
I’m talking, of course, about physical inventory counts. They’re dull, dreary, mind-numbing, and usually filled with errors and inaccuracies resulting from disinterested employees who don’t do this sort of thing more than once a year. Beyond that, consider that in a recent survey, it was reported that the top 4 causes of shrink are employee-related. And you want your employees counting your valuable merchandise?
So what’s the solution? Have somebody else do it! A third-party inventory service can turn a drawn-out, exhausting ordeal into an efficient, short-lived and highly-beneficial event. Auditors who do this for a living are fast, accurate, and they have technology at their disposal for capturing the data and processing it in real-time to produce data in an organized, coherent format.
Why even do an inventory if it’s going to cost your company a small fortune in labor hours, with the result being a pile of confusing data that can’t be trusted? Hire experts to do it. Save money. And get accurate information that can be used to more successfully track shrink and help your loss prevention department succeed.