How Portable Barcode Scanners Can Make Your Inventory Count Fast and Accurate

Portable barcode scanners can drastically improve the speed and accuracy of your inventory count processes. Accurate inventory control is one of the most important elements of a successful business. Accurate inventory tracking can help to increase sales, improve inventory turnover speeds, reduce theft, identify low-selling items and improve your profit margins.

One of the easiest and most effective ways to improve the accuracy of your inventory is to implement a barcoding system where each inventory item is tagged with a barcode label the minute it arrives at your store or warehouse. Once each item is tagged with a barcode and scanned into your point of sale or inventory management software, more accurate inventory records can be kept.

If the item is sold, it will be scanned during the checkout process and removed from inventory. Similarly if the item is transferred to another location, the barcode of the item can be scanned and tracked more accurately.

However, where a properly setup barcoding system really shines is during inventory count. Traditionally inventory counts were a tedious and often despised part of any business that manages inventory. Employees hate inventory count because it takes a long period of time, it's boring and very often inaccurate.

By using portable barcode scanners, the process of inventory count can be greatly improved and made much more accurate. Employees simply walk around the store or warehouse with a portable hand-held inventory scanner and they scan the barcodes on each item. They no longer need to try to identify the exact SKU or item number or model number of the inventory item they are looking at. All they need to do is scan the barcode and the scanner automatically identifies the item they are scanning. Then the employees simply need to either enter in a quantity number of items of the same type or scan the barcode of each of the items.

Once the inventory is counted with one of these portable inventory scanners, it can be uploaded into your point of sale software and the data can be analyzed. The speed of inventory count can be greatly increased with such a system and so it is also easier to improve the accuracy by going back to items that were counted to verify any discrepancies.

With such an efficient system, inventory counting can be done on a rolling basis throughout the month as opposed to just once a month or once every quarter.

Barcoding systems have come a long way and the integration between barcode printers, barcode scanners and inventory management / point of sale software has been massively improved over the last five years.