With managing a store comes the task of managing inventory – one of the biggest, and trickiest, assets for an owner.

Inventory is an important part of any kind of business, no matter how big or small it may be. Failure to manage it will not only affect your stocks, but will ultimately hurt your sales, and your success. In order to prevent that from happening, you need to avoid making inventory mistakes – especially the common ones that slip by our attention the easiest.

Lucky for you, we’ve got them covered:

Unqualified Employees

When hiring people for inventory management, owners sometimes forget to properly train them for the job, in fear of halting operations for too long. This results in your entire warehouse being handed to the wrong person – and that always spells disaster.

If you want inventory management to be seamless from the get-go, then your team handling it must be well-trained from the start. Prioritise training as a strong part of your work ethics, so that you never have to deal with an unqualified employee.

Ignoring Inventory Counts

When you’re managing everything on a high-level, you often think that counting inventory is not needed.

The reality is that this is the easiest – and biggest – mistake you could make. Inventory counting makes sure that your shelves have the same amount of products that you’ve got logged in your systems. Any discrepancy, and you’ll be negatively affecting your profit margin.

Inventory counting should therefore be done on a regular basis. Using a barcode system makes the entire process of manual counting simpler, so that you don’t have to waste precious time or energy.

Disorganized Warehouse

It’s impossible for a store owner to manage all business aspects, which may cause them to work with a disorganized warehouse.

This is actually detrimental for any kind of business. Inventory management calls for a lot more than just stuffing all your products in one building; it needs everything organized on the right shelves, with the right labels, so that employees find it easy to navigate themselves. Products that are on high demand must be placed in the most accessible place, and products should be rotated accordingly so that they don’t grow dusty with disuse.

To be fair, there still will be times when your warehouse may face some sudden problem, and become disorganized. The bottom-line is that you should always have a strict process to fall back to, so that you can pick yourselves up easily.

Lack Of Forecasting

An average inventory management process let’s you focus on your current stock levels – but a great inventory management process let’s you focus on the future as well.

Being unable to forecast your product requirements creates unnecessary problems like overstocking, low stocks, and even dusty inventory. This creates gaps between your store and your warehouse; you fail to provide your customers with their favorite products, and so lose their loyalty. Furthermore, you can’t plan ahead, hence slowing down your entire business’s growth.

In order to fix that, you need to invest in a good inventory management system. One good inventory management system in Pakistan is the one found in Oscar POS. It automates the tedious process of going through old sales to give forecasting metrics for the future. Furthermore, it allows you to update your stock levels in real-time – even during sales – so that your data is always accurate. Plus, it gives low stock alerts and helps prevent problems like dusty inventory, low stocks, and even pilferage.


If you want your business to flourish, then all parts of your business should work seamlessly. And once you avoid the above mentioned inventory mistakes, your warehouse functions will become top-notch in no time.