Inventory management software
What is inventory management software?
Inventory management software is the program a company keeps its stock in: goods in, goods out, transfers between locations, stock counts and cost price. It holds a quantity per item and per location, and issues the documents behind every movement. A smaller firm runs it on its own; in a larger one it is the warehouse module of the ERP system. The online shop reads its numbers, not the other way round.
Example
An online shop selling power tools carries 2,000 items and sells through its own site and one marketplace. Stock is kept in the inventory program, because that is the only place that knows what arrived on an invoice, what left on a delivery note and what came back. The site knows nothing about any of it until something tells it.
At 1,200 orders a month and 1.5% cancelled for want of stock, that is 18 orders; at an average of €60 it is around €1,080 of turnover, the refunds, and 18 apologetic phone calls. Once quantities move from the inventory program to the site on a schedule and an order reserves the goods at checkout, cancellations drop to a fraction of a percent. The amounts are illustrative, but the order of magnitude is real.
Why it matters for a business
Inventory management software does things a shop platform does not: it tracks batches and expiry dates, splits a quantity across locations and shelves, works out a weighted average cost, records stock counts and write-offs, and keeps the name of whoever made each movement. That record is what the accounts and the warranty claim later rest on.
Three things decide how well it connects: what it can hand out (a file, a database view or an API), which field identifies an item on both sides, and how often it can be read without slowing down. Sync runs on a schedule — every few hours, or a few times a day — which is exactly why a buffer and a reservation at checkout are part of the design rather than an extra.
Connecting inventory software to a shop is the work we do as warehouse sync.
What to ask
- What can the program hand out to other systems, and who keeps that working after an update?
- Which field identifies an item on both sides, and who maintains the mapping?
- Is stock reserved when an order is placed, or only written off when it ships?
- How are several warehouses handled, and which one serves the website?
- What happens, and who finds out, when an exchange fails?