One of the most time-consuming tasks you’ll face in operating a retail store is keeping up with your stock. Unless you have a very narrow product mix, you’ll spend a significant chunk of time tracking inventory.

Although it requires work and discipline to maintain, a good inventory system will make it easier to meet the needs of your customers - the key to growing a successful business.

Inventory management software is a computer-based system for tracking inventory levels, orders, sales and deliveries. It can also be used in the manufacturing industry to create a work order, bill of materials and other production-related documents. Companies use inventory management software to avoid product overstock and outages. It is a tool for organizing inventory data that before was generally stored in hard-copy form or in spreadsheets.

A team of two tech-entrepreneurs in their senior six vacation have developed a similar system named ‘e-nventory’ that today is giving sellers a better experience with monitoring sales and reducing theft while doing all this in a timely manner.

"The application was developed to provide archives of all the activities of the organization so that the company might compare it with other financial statements for a better view of the organization financial status and compare the expected profit and the actual one,” says Oasis Agano, the e-nventory managing director.

Agano goes ahead to say the software is built for small, medium and large enterprises for controlling their business from any location.

Benefits of the e-ventory software

Theft control. Without an inventory system, it’s impossible to know if you’re being ripped off by customers or employees until it’s too late

Customer service. You can avoid running out of stock and can determine if an item’s in stock and locate it more readily if you keep track. You can also locate out-of-stock items, their prices, and manufacturers.

Financial management. Inventory systems help you keep track of how you’re doing. It makes little sense to go for an entire year without knowing the status of your stock.

Product tracking. You can track specific items and weed out low sellers with sales or markdowns.

One disadvantage of using a package inventory system is the inability to use stock numbers that relate an item to a specific product and vendor. Another disadvantage is that e-nventory works online and without internet, it isn’t accessible.

Even with the need for such software, Agano thinks there is still lot to learn as they deal with different clients.

"It’s a different experience with different shops of different sizes and products but we are ready to face it. Also, some shop owners haven’t understood the benefit of integrating IT in their buses. With time, we hope to build the product much better and develop it,” he says with an optimistic tone.