There comes a time when your business starts growing, and doing purchasing off Excel spreadsheets becomes a suboptimal and rather questionable option. That’s when your PO processes need a rethink. Here are 5 improvements to your purchasing processes you can achieve by using HandiFox Online.
1. Set up optimal replenishment triggers to avoid surplus inventory or understocking
Inventory levels which are on point is not something you figure out overnight. It takes months of sales metrics analysis, and, of course, being in the know about your market’s demand. Once you got them worked out, there is the Quantity on Hand Viewer
page in the web part of HandiFox Online where you can pre-set reorder points and desired quantity on hand values for every single item across all the inventory storage sites you have. You can enter individual values for items at specific sites or choose “All” sites and enter values that will be copied across all locations where the said items are stored.
This way your purchasing is optimized and automated to the extent when you can be confident restocking will be done in a timely manner.
2. Consult the app’s replenishment suggestions to make better purchasing decisions
To start with, the Items to order window on the main dashboard is there to alert you of what items at what site are running low. The numbers it shows are the most up-to-date and reflect the app’s calculations based on the preset replenishment triggers we talked about just a while ago.
The cart icon will take you to generating a new PO. Did we mention the process is completely automated? You can populate a PO based on sales data for a given period of time, as well as reorder point/desired quantity on hand values. Another nice thing is that the app can calculate your replenishment needs for the foreseeable future.
3. Make receiving seamless and streamlined with the help of barcode scanners.
HandiFox Online mobile app connects to bluetooth barcode scanners and also allows using the device’s camera to read and record products’ barcodes. So, when you get a new delivery from a supplier, open the associated PO and scan in items’ barcodes to see if you really got what you ordered. In case there are multiple orders from one vendor that need receiving, you can combine several POs and do batch receiving. This should save you a lot of operational time on heavy-volume days.
4. Review Purchase by Vendor reports to manage your suppliers more productively
HandiFox provides purchasing reports that detail how products by different vendors have been performing – you can rely on this data to make up your mind whether to order more/less from these companies. It won’t hurt to know who your most ‘profitable’ suppliers are.
Other than providing these insights, the app also lets you choose a Preferred Vendor for each product. When generating a new PO, you might want to check “hide items with other preferred vendors”, if you want the software to show only products with one specific vendor of your choice.
5. Use the software to its fullest potential.There is much more HandiFox Online can do to bolster and streamline your purchasing processes:
- Case size rounding for those businesses that order on a per case basis
- The ability to save filter setup for purchase transactions, make it default or share your favorite views with other users
- Printing product labels or hard copies of digital transactions on the spot
- Multi-currency support which lets you handle POs for vendors with foreign currencies.
HandiFox Online is ideally suited for small businesses with multiple locations and a need to standardize and centralize their purchasing. To get a better feel of how it all works and fits into your current business workflows, take a free 30-day trial.