Saved time is what small inventory-centered businesses value over anything else. Bin location functionality is one of the time savers most SMB owners hope to get when purchasing inventory management software. Even if your inventory control system doesn’t support bins, you can do without them and be fine. But why settle for ‘fine’ when you could do great? Let’s see what the bin location feature actually does for your warehouse team.
Bins – a small but powerful improvement
Every warehouse is built and organized with the business’ specificity in mind but, generally, there is an aisle-section-shelf-bin matrix. So, bin is the smallest storage sub-location there is in a warehouse. Bin tracking is normally part of advanced warehousing and is not available in QuickBooks Desktop until the Enterprise version. QuickBooks Online doesn’t have it at all.
The importance of bins is akin to knowing an apartment number when you are visiting a friend who lives in a many-storeyed house. To find, move, audit, count or put inventory away, your stockers and pickers shouldn’t feel as if they were boy scouts practicing orienteering – they must be able to read the item’s address in a matter of seconds, and spend the minimal travel time getting there.
In a nutshell, what bins do is they make your warehouse easy to navigate, and your warehouse workers speedy and accurate in their daily operations.
Proper bin naming is another adoption consideration that can boost the efficiency of the bin location system. More on this read here.
How HandiFox addresses Bins
As said earlier, bin tracking is only available in QuickBooks Enterprise with Advanced Inventory. As HandiFox Desktop follows QuickBooks Enterprise, it can pull bin addresses for every single product on the item list from QuickBooks and push them into the HandiFox mobile app. So, your stockers/pickers will be able to use their phones to
- assign/reassign bins to items when generating a PO
- see products’ bin IDs while receiving stock against a PO where these bins were assigned
- use bin locations on Pick lists to up the pick rate and reduce pick errors.
The bin location feature came much later to HandiFox Online, which made it all the more exciting for our dev team to finally deliver this functionality. As of now, you have the ability to assign bins to your products in HandiFox Online. Whether it’s counting, transfer, receipt or pick&pack, bin addresses will be on all transactions guiding your warehouse personnel through the storage facility.
HandiFox inventory tracking tools will help you get more things done with less time. Start your free trial now.