Tidying up and organizing a messy inventory is no small task, even for small businesses. Maintaining order with pen-and-paper is a dying process prone to error, and purchasing inventory management software to shoulder the burden is expensive.
If only there were a cheap way to manage inventory — enter free inventory management software. We understand your doubts. The world of inventory management is an expensive one. Businesses spare no expense to develop an efficient and accurate method to store, pick and ship their goods. However, these expenditures are worth it.
Firstly, and most obviously, free inventory tracking software is, well, free. This lack of expenditure immediately removes any expense-related barriers involved in adopting the system, and in the same vein, quickly boosts the ROI associated with implementing this new software.
If you are coming from an analog operation, simply switching to a digital system comes with numerous benefits. Reducing manual data entry, integrating forecasting tools and leveraging automation features can breathe life into a floundering business. Not only that, but customers who you could have lost to shipping errors or a lack of demand planning can be brought back into the fold and turned into return clients. Before we jump into the top platforms, covering the must-have features of a successful management system one of the critical factors you need to consider.
Being free certainly is attractive, but without these key features, the cheap system you have your eye on may not cover all your bases. Our analyst team dug through the inventory management market and discovered these top features to be sure and look for:. Keeping track of a product as it travels from warehouse to shipping is vital. Whether this involves using RFID technology, barcode scanners or real-time stock views, a successful system will keep you updated on where a product is, when it needs to move and how to store it at maximum warehousing efficiency.
Many businesses have to transfer stock between warehouses and other locations regularly. A successful management solution should make product movement simple while also providing in-depth information about each move. Included within this feature is the ability to bundle products together, also known as kitting. Creating and sending purchase orders by hand feels similar to Dark Ages torture. Your cheap inventory management system should allow you to create single or bulk POs online and email them directly to your suppliers.
Some solutions can automatically generate POs as certain item levels drop within the warehouse. While you may think shipping belongs in the world of transportation management , your inventory system actually plays a starring role in getting products shipped out correctly. The best systems allow for multi-carrier and multi-modal shipment strategies.
You want the most options available as possible to ensure your customers receive their goods on time. Many systems can automatically generate critical shipping documentation and labels to attach to packages or store for later use as backups.
Any system worth its salt should give you support for order management, from creating the order to fulfillment of the product. Other helpful features of order management let you develop custom pricing guides, send quotes to customers, mark committed stock and send invoices. Analytics and reporting are the lifeblood of any growing business. These tools give you real-time access to demand information, on-hand stock, total sales, tax information and more. Features like these provide managers and stakeholders up-to-date information to back up their decision-making processes.
Analytics can also point out areas of your operation that are suffering or inefficient, giving you the tools required to step in before more significant problems arise. The modern workforce is becoming more and more reliant on mobility as time goes on. How to detect problems. All collected inventory information is stored in a centralized database, so you can work with all assets at once.
For example, you can find all machines where a specific model of motherboard is installed. Or you can find all machines running a specific software. The program displays inventory information grouped by asset type and you can use data sorting and filtering options to easily find the required information. How to find information. Do you need an inventory report?
It isn't a problem, because the program allows you to generate a report using the collected inventory information. You can use built-in reports or create a custom report. Custom reports can be created using a powerful built-in report generator, so you can customize data in report and also change report layout and apply custom branding.
Learn more about reporting. The program includes a special feature targeted at software licenses compliance. It uses the collected software inventory information to calculate the total number of copies of each software installed across your organization. It is compared with the number of ordered licenses to see the difference. The licensing compliance feature is customizable, so you can configure the program to skip free software items or set other compliance conditions.
How compliance works. Follow a few steps to collect inventory information from network machines remotely and to generate various inventory reports. The program uses Microsoft network features to collect inventory information from remote machines. Make sure that they are enabled on all machines. Administrative permissions on remote machines are required to collect inventory info, so you need to run the program as a domain admin or specify admin credentials.
Specify remote machines to be audited by the program. The program allows you to enumerate entire network and audit all discovered machines, or you can scan specific machines only. Select a domains and workgroups to be scanned or specify a target IP range. It takes a few seconds to collect inventory info from each machine. When network enumeration is finished you can review the collected inventory information. For each audited machine you can review its hardware, software and system information.
The program also represents inventory information by asset type, for example, by a CPU, so you can check all CPUs on a single screen and see where each model is installed. Generate inventory reports using built-in report templates. If you need, you can specify custom branding, so reports will be generated with your company name and logo. You can also create custom reports using a visual report generation editor.
There you can select inventory data to be included into a report, output format and other options. The program can collect inventory information remotely from computers connected to a LAN. It supports auditing machines working in multiple domains and workgroups. Administrative access to remote machines is required to audit them. The collected inventory information is displayed by the program and organized by asset types.
If required, you can edit data collected automatically or add new data. The entered values can be protected from replacement by data retrieved automatically. To collect inventory data automatically you can configure the program to discover new machines connected to the network and audit them.
Clicking the product count will display the various hardware devices manufactured by that vendor. The hardware inventory tool provides the list of hardware detected in the network along with their count and installed copies. Clicking the hardware count shows the different types of the hardware. It asset management software enables administrators to get notified through email if any new hardware is detected in the network. For more details on Hardware Inventory Management refer to the Hardware and Software Inventory topic of the online help documentation.
Hardware inventory management is the recording and tracking of hardware assets and IT inventory in an organization. Hardware inventory software is a tool that automatically tracks and fetches all hardware data and provides administrators with a snapshot on the state of hardware in their corporate network. Our hardware inventory tool lets you keep tabs on all your endpoint devices from a single dashboard.
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