When conducting an End-of-Year Inventory (and your inventory is bar coded). Any recommendations for a hand-held portable bar-code-reader that allows you to scan inventory and can be dumped into an Excel spreadsheet as opposed to doing a manual inventory?

(1) Some POS systems allow you to do this but they tend to be the more advanced ones. I am kind of old school and think there is great value in literally counting every widget in your shop. It is your bi-annual chance to find items that are damaged or mis-tagged and allows for a good system for checks-n-balances to make sure you are getting accurate counts. With all hands on deck it should take you 6-8 hours.

 

(2) Not sure how that can work. Did a handheld scanner of our inventory on January 2, and it took 13 hrs!

 

(3) We counted all 2K SKU’s 2X’s a year and started at 10am and finished by 6pm with double counts of all items that were way off. Then we spit-shinned the shop- another great excuse to close for a day in January/August.

 

(4) Did you put them on a count sheet tally and then manually enter them?

 

(5) Yes– our POS system created count sheets by department (or any way we wanted to sort them) and told us what we should have and then a blank line for what we actually had. At the end of the night we went through the system and did the update.