The year-end inventory process can be a time-consuming and complex operation for many businesses. With so much at stake, having an accurate cycle count is critical to maintaining the proper stock levels of inventory on hand and avoiding costly write offs on obsolete or lost items.
Asset tracking solutions offer a solution that ensures your stock count numbers and inventory records remain up to date throughout the calendar year, saving you valuable time and resources during the busy season of annual inventories.
In this blog post, we will explore how asset tracking can save your business significant effort while providing real-time insight into your assets in order to make sound business decisions.
The Importance Of An Accurate And Timely Year End Inventory Count
Accurate and timely inventory counts are a crucial link between financial success and business failure. This is because the value of the inventory held on a company’s balance sheet, including both raw materials and finished goods, directly affects its financial position.
Moreover, managing assets in a way that optimizes profitability is essential for any organization’s long-term viability, and an up-to-date understanding of what’s on hand characterizes best practice for efficient inventory management.
Failing to accurately track items in inventory accounting not only affects the accuracy of pricing decisions, but also hinders future planning around production, orders and sales.
Therefore, it is important to take advantage of current technologies, such as inventory management software, to ensure the highest degree of accuracy during year end physical inventory counts.
What Is Asset Tracking? Why Is It Important For Year End Inventory?
Asset tracking is a process of monitoring the real time location, quantity, and condition of valuable inventory items as they move around. This is typically done through software-enabled systems such as barcodes or radio-frequency identification (RFID).
During year-end inventory, accurate asset tracking can make the task much simpler.
By accurately recording an organization’s assets and inventory throughout the year, businesses can quickly and easily count valuable items at the end of the year.
Accurate asset monitoring can also save time by reducing manual identification methods for all incoming products as well as ensuring that every item is accounted for during annual reports.
Additionally, it ensures that every item allocated has a specific location so there’s no unnecessary confusion when locating resources.
In short, asset tracking offers clear advantages when it comes to improving accuracy in organizational resource management—especially during year-end physical inventories.
Year End Inventory Challenges In The Absence Of Asset Tracking
Accurate inventory tracking is essential for business success, yet performing an inventory count at the end of the financial year can represent a considerable challenge, particularly without an asset tracking solution in place pre count.
Manual methods of counting involve slow moving, tedious and labor-intensive processes such as manual data entry and physical stocktaking of items – all of which are prone to errors in inventory reporting.
Inaccuracies made by those who performed the count can lead to wrong purchasing decisions, inventory imbalances or discrepancies between stock records, financial statements, and those in the warehouse. This further makes managing multi-site setups challenging with no way to ensure balances across locations or track changes centrally.
Moreover, lack of visibility over current stock levels leaves businesses exposed to financial losses from potentially having too much or too little on hand.
These challenges demonstrate why investing in a robust asset tracking solution can give companies peace of mind about their year-end inventory counts.
How Asset Tracking Can Help You Streamline The Year End Inventory Process
The year-end inventory process can be time-consuming and complex, but using asset tracking solutions can help streamline the process.
Through automated data collection and tracking capabilities, asset tracking solutions keep track of all assets in real time, helping make audit and reporting processes easier.
Automated reports allow you to quickly compare the actual counts to your financial records, giving you visibility into discrepancies. This helps save considerable amounts of time that would have been used manually managing records and provides greater accuracy in auditing.
Asset tracking solutions also provide a complete history of all transactions, further improving the accuracy and speed of year-end audits.
Additional Benefits Of Implementing An Asset Tracking Solution
An asset tracking solution offers more than just an efficient way to conduct year end inventory.
Such a solution allows for the accurate tracking and reporting of asset usage, ensuring that assets are being used effectively and to the greatest benefit. With real-time visibility into asset utilization, organizations can gain an improved understanding of the total cost of ownership of an asset throughout its life span.
Furthermore, a well-implemented system further reduces losses due to misplacement or asset theft, since all assets can be monitored and traced even after leaving the physical property.
In addition, automated systems make it possible to track key maintenance records over time, helping provide insight into necessary repairs before further damages occur.
Finally, conducting maintenance with a system in place saves resources by eliminating outages associated with manual documentation processes.
Overall, instituting an asset tracking solution is an effective business strategy for achieving financial savings in both the short and long term.
Streamline Your Year End Inventory Count With Radiant’s Asset Tracking Solution
An asset tracking solution can help streamline your year end inventory count process by automating data collection and providing real-time visibility into your assets.
In addition to simplifying the inventory counting process, asset tracking provides other benefits such as improved security and compliance, reduced costs, and increased operational efficiency.
If you’re looking for an asset tracking solution to help streamline your year end inventory count, request a demo of Radiant’s solution below.
Last Updated on December 20, 2022 by Radiant