Reduce Theft. By computerizing, you can reduce theft in your business by an average of 2½%. An average small business doing $500,000 per year can reduce in-store theft by an average of $12,500. How? Your employees become more involved in watching the store inventory if they know that every piece of inventory in your business is being tracked; from the moment it is in till it is bar-code scanned out.

Reduce Inventory Shrinkage. By watching your inventory and comparing on shelf inventory to your computerized reports, both you and your employees are much more careful about giving away inventory, retaining obsolete inventory, monitoring breakage and non-theft inventory that normal businesses lose all the time, as well as checking inventory as the items enter your store. Statistically, you can reduce inventory shrinkage by up to another 2½% by computerizing.

Reduce Your Inventory. If the inventory reports are available, you can make sure that you stock up more wisely. You don’t need to keep stock of 50 carton of Orange Squash, when your average weekly sales is only 10 cartons, or stocking up Easter Eggs during Christmas season!

Increase Your Inventory. You don’t need 50 cartons of Orange Squash, but you may need 100 more cartons of Mineral Water for your store during the month of August. Many stores order products based on what they think they sell. If you check your inventory reports and see that you sold 100 cartons of Mineral Water last August, it gives you a good clue to help make sure that you don’t run out of Mineral Water this August. Watching your inventory reports increases your efficiency.

Accuracy. Every item in your store has a price associated with it. Never again will you have to figure out how much that flashlight sells for. Your clerks will stop guessing those prices.

Watch Your Margins. By reading your reports you may find that you sell 1,000 bottle of Mineral Water that cost 48 cents for 50 cents each and that you sell 100 bottle of Isotonic drinks that cost $1.98 for $9.95 each. Your inventory reports will help you to stock more products that give you greater profits and fewer products that give you the least amount of profit.

Speed Customer Checkout. Computerizing speeds up your customer checkout. With a barcode scanner, you can checkout a customer in less than half the time required with a cash register. Even if you don’t use a barcode scanner, your checkout is still faster and more accurate because you are entering inventory item numbers which are automatically tied to the Promotion Price management module specified in DailyCount for each inventory item.

Keep Track of Your Customers. Your best customers are your present customers. No matter what type of store you have, you should try to obtain the name and address of every one of your customers. Keeping a customer list is an obvious asset for a clothing store. You want your customers to keep coming back, especially when you have a sale.

Mailing to your customers periodically keeps them coming back. Mailing to your customers is the best form of advertising – even if it is just a quick postcard listing a few new sale items. Every mailing to your customer list will always be a positive to your cash flow. What about a store such as a convenience store? You don’t have to get the name and address of every customer that walks into the store, but you should get the names and addresses of your best customers.