Stock control in MYOB Advanced: A better way to manage your warehouse

With MYOB Advanced stock control you can finally gain the visibility you need to balance inventory levels. Learn how the ERP helps distributors to more easily marry back-end warehouse management with delivery logistics, customer service and financial management.

While a typical warehouse might look like a generic sea of boxes arranged in rows—each and every pallet rack holds the secret to your business’ success and dynamic distributors can’t take a single inch of shelf space for granted.

Your viability relies on the efficiency and skill with which you can acquire and deliver your products from the manufacturer to market, making stock control a vital aspect of your organisation. Every cardboard carton and corner of your warehouse is either making you money or costing you.

Unlocking the full potential of your inventory

Getting the most from every box sitting on every shelf means being able to:

• Know actual stock counts, including counts by multiple units and the exact colour/sizes/styles of goods in stock.
• Monitor stock in transit, and see exactly where it is within a warehouse or across multiple sites.
• Quickly locate and dispatch items to customers, easily manage warranties and speedy returns.
• Draw on a high-level view of stock movement to eliminate wasted space and dead stock.
• Understand costs, sales and demand, to anticipate when to re-order without overstocking.

Achieving this requires systematic, digital and automated processes—manual or siloed information management where one or two people have access to a spreadsheet won’t cut it, and won’t enable your business to scale practices as you grow.

To enable best practice inventory management it’s important to categorise your stock, track and audit inventory, closely monitor sales and replenishment, and invest in integrated technology.

For small to medium enterprises involved in wholesale trade and distribution, a technology solution that’s been proven to support more streamlined and coordinated inventory management is MYOB Advanced.

MYOB Advanced Supply Chain Management

MYOB Advanced is robust Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software tailor-made for SMEs, and includes in-built tools to help you take your stock control to the next level:

• Accurately valuate inventory and undertake cost management;
• Use location-specific inventory quantities, allocations and costs to manage stock across multiple warehouses; and
• Assign and track details that help you segment stock, see quantities at the sub-category level as well as aggregated totals.

In addition, implementing the Supply Chain Management Suite gives you even greater control over inventory in real-time, and associated functions from procurement—with algorithms that notify you with replenishment recommendations—through to sales and support.

The easily activated module can strengthen your distribution company’s ability to optimise the way you enter and fulfil sales orders—for example, splitting order across multiple warehouses. Notifications keep you aware of problems with a customer’s order and help you address them fast.

MYOB Advanced with Supply Chain Management also makes it simpler to gather requests or bids from multiple suppliers, create and approve quotes, and fulfil orders for internal needs and customers.

Minimise waste, maximise sales

Integrated software enables you to organise and ship inventory in ways that will save you time, reduce waste, and improve margins and return on inventory.

Having a digitally-enabled handle on stock helps you decide what you need to order more of, or more frequently. For example, you can segment stock by high-ticket items that sell less regularly; moderately priced items; and low-cost items that turn over quickly.

A unified view lets you determine which items are bringing in the majority of your profits, so you can:

• Concentrate your efforts on certain items or ranges of products;
• Enhance specific customer relationships or networks in profitable industries;
• Make more informed decisions about new product lines; or
• Explore ways to enhance the sales or delivery process to make more from each sale.

It also helps you cut waste. It’s likely that some stock consistently fails to sell well, or has such a long shelf life that it ends up costing you more to store, insure and handle than the profit margin warrants. Having a broader range of inventory is not always the best approach if those items don’t turn over quickly, but you need accurate numbers to make a determination.

In the same vein, while safety stock is necessary—are you confident that you’re not over-investing in inventory that’s only required to compensate for systematic errors, oversights, shrinkage and what should be predictable variation in your sales cycles?

Faster access to aggregated data, predictive algorithms, and alerts means better forecasting for your business. Which in turn means fewer fail-safes are required so you can operate a leaner warehouse and a more successful distribution business.

Move forward with advanced stock control

Great inventory management is essential to being able to run a successful wholesale and distribution business —it helps you reduce the costs associated with purchasing and holding stock, and enables you to give people the products they want when they want them.

We are an MYOB Advanced Platinum Partner with an extensive track record in working with wholesale distribution companies looking to benefit from digital transformation.

Speak with one of our friendly consultants about whether MYOB Advanced is right for your wholesale distribution business.