What is Perpetual Inventory?

You already know that one of the challenges of running a well-stocked store is keeping track of your inventory. This task could become increasingly difficult as you add an eCommerce store, additional storefronts, and warehouse inventory into the mix. But with ACID, you can continuously know your exact stock numbers in real-time!

The ACID point of sale system maintains a perpetual inventory count across all of your physical stores, websites, and warehouses. When you sell items, accept returns, or get deliveries, the system instantly updates your inventory count in real-time.

Perpetual Inventory

Perpetual inventory functionality provides massive benefits to your business, including understanding buying trends, locating product for a sale, recognizing deadstock, and in triggering ordering at preset levels. Imagine never overbuying because of misplaced inventory or running out of stock because you didn’t order ahead of time. You can also sell down close to actual zero, without having to worry about not being able to fill orders.

When you realize you have stale inventory, you can plan sales or other incentives to recapture your storage space. If you have date-sensitive merchandise in one location that is closer to expiring, you can move it out before selling the fresher product you might have stored somewhere else.

Because ACID provides immediate real-time data about purchasing, you don’t have to wait for inventory reconciliation to feel confident about your numbers. ACID’s perpetual inventory system offers enormous advantages that allow you a comprehensive view of the way your customers are purchasing. You can discover the impact of running sales or the saleability of new merchandise. ACID always gives you real-time results, so you know what you have in inventory and can even set the system to notify you to reorder stock proactively.

ACID can show you detailed real-time reports as well as snapshots of any desired periods. You can also make reports readily available for any of your management staff with appropriate permissions.

This multi-warehouse functionality can account for an unlimited amount of stock and variations. Many competitors either do not provide stock tracking or require expensive third-party services. Perpetual inventory is a basic part of ACID at no additional cost!

When your staff knows that you track your stock, you minimize employee theft and increase accountability. You can also quickly react to supplier issues and fill every order that comes from any sales channel without sending customers away empty-handed. ACID gives you many options for moving stock from your various locations or routing product directly to a customer’s home via your delivery drivers or third-party shipping.

Perpetual inventory flawlessly tracks how your inventory numbers should look in real-time based on what the system knows about sales, returns, and receiving. But the disadvantage of living in a physical world versus virtual is that you can do all the accounting correctly and still be off in the counts.

To make ACID’s perpetual inventory accounting 100% accurate, we must compensate for the reality of unreported breakage, theft, miscounts, and other shrinkage reasons. Conversely, employee or supplier errors can result in uncounted excess inventory. You know that inventory reconciliation is a necessary evil. However, ACID gives you powerful options for reconciling actual inventory against the system records without having to stop business to do it!

You can configure inventory reconciliation to your needs in ways that suit your business and not disrupt it! For instance, you can choose:

• location, such as a particular warehouse or store,
• how frequently you want to conduct the inventory reconciliation,
• a randomized choice of products,
• specific stock SKUs (such as high dollar items),
• your weekly 20% best selling items, and
• many other configurations!

ACID keeps track of the stock reconciliation methods you want and need to keep your perpetual inventory accurate. It saves you the hassle of having to piece together a manual representation of your stock. Never again do you have to spend overnights in your store scanning product, unless you really want to do that! ACID is here to liberate you.

Instead of having to spend all night doing inventory as a solid-block, you can eliminate the disruption to your business. You have the flexibility to focus on the stock that matters most to you during a specific period. For instance, you may choose to run inventory reconciliation on summer items versus winter stock. You might also want to forego or reduce the frequency for low dollar merchandise.

ACID will let you designate time weekly, monthly, quarterly, or another interval, so you do not ever have to inventory your entire stock during a non-stop session. The choice of how you want to reconcile is up to you, and you can change it whenever you want. By splitting up your inventory reconciliation using ACID’s powerful scheduling functionality, a randomized selection of products, or any of our other options, you will always maintain accurate stock counts.

You can mix-and-match reconciliation methods. You might choose to randomly select products from specific stock SKUs and also designate that 100% of your high-dollar SKUs are frequently reconciled. You always have control over how you run inventory reconciliation. Additionally, it is up to you how you want to share the details of your methods with employees or partners. The system automates the process without your operator having to know specifics or access to your reports unless you want.

ACID POS perpetual inventory functionality gives you an accurate real-time picture of your stock. The scope and flexibility of this and other ACID features give you the powerful tools you need. As a cloud-based system, it is ideal for businesses of any size since it is easy to scale as a company grows. Let ACID free you from your inventory headaches.