Retail inventory control software

[SlitheryDee]

My dad died recently and has left my grandparents to to run the small retail store that has been in our family for over 40 years.

I'm trying to help them streamline the business so that it's easier to manage. I was looking through their stockroom today and was shocked at the abysmal state of their inventory. They're primarily a clothing and footwear retailer so keeping popular sizes in stock is very important and is the main thing that I would like to get straight right now.

Currently they are using a pen-and-paper approach to managing their inventory. Quite often they don't know exactly what they have in stock or what's on order at a given moment and I feel that some kind of small business inventory control software would go a long way in making the business easier to run. The problem is that I don't know where to start looking for something that will fit their needs.

Can anyone point me to reliable 3rd party reviewers of small business/retail software? Any program suggestions?

 

[SlitheryDee]

anyone?

 

[mayest]

Have you looked at Quickbooks Pro or Premier 2006? They apparently do some inventory stuff, but you'd have to look to see if they will do what you need.

Quickbooks Pro

 

[troytime]

do they have a point of sale system at all, or are they doing manual pricing?

i did a good months worth of research recently on these systems.
one thing i learned, theres a TON of em out there.

the one i was most impressed with came from a place called Your IT Dept.
i can't find crap on them right now, but i have a lot of quotes in my email at work if you'd like.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Originally posted by: troytime
do they have a point of sale system at all, or are they doing manual pricing?

i did a good months worth of research recently on these systems.
one thing i learned, theres a TON of em out there.

the one i was most impressed with came from a place called Your IT Dept.
i can't find crap on them right now, but i have a lot of quotes in my email at work if you'd like.

Manual pricing. There is no computerised POS system in place. They just use an old cash register and price everything rather randomly by memory. Right now I'm using Quickbooks Basic 2004 to manage their charge accounts, but my grandmother is doing the bulk of the accounting (vendor invoices, expenses, account balancing) in a standard paper ledger.

Quickbooks 2004 does have tha ability to track inventory but there seems to be no way to easily track items and set reorder points by size for a single SKU (small, medium, larg, etc.), which is very important to a clothing retailer. It can only track by quantity which is useless when I may need to fill in specific sizes within a single style or item type.

 

[platinumike]

im curious what'd you study in college?

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: SlitheryDee

Originally posted by: troytime
do they have a point of sale system at all, or are they doing manual pricing?

i did a good months worth of research recently on these systems.
one thing i learned, theres a TON of em out there.

the one i was most impressed with came from a place called Your IT Dept.
i can't find crap on them right now, but i have a lot of quotes in my email at work if you'd like.

Manual pricing. There is no computerised POS system in place. They just use an old cash register and price everything rather randomly by memory. Right now I'm using Quickbooks Basic 2004 to manage their charge accounts, but my grandmother is doing the bulk of the accounting (vendor invoices, expenses, account balancing) in a standard paper ledger.

Quickbooks 2004 does have tha ability to track inventory but there seems to be no way to easily track items and set reorder points by size for a single SKU (small, medium, larg, etc.), which is very important to a clothing retailer. It can only track by quantity which is useless when I may need to fill in specific sizes within a single style or item type.

QuickBooks Pro ($200) indicates that it can set reorder points.

Track Inventory
Track inventory, set reorder points and create purchase orders QuickBooks inventory reports show you the status of stock-on-hand, open purchase orders and more.

It may also be able to integrate into the POS system.

Works with QuickBooks Point of Sale Point of Sale is easy-to-use retail management software that handles all of your critical inventory, sales and customer information in one place. It can be used together with QuickBooks Financial Software, award-winning small business accounting software.

When used together, they create a complete retail small business management suite, including financial accounting. Save time and help reduce manual bookkeeping errors by automatically transferring data to QuickBooks Financial Software with one click. Works especially well with QuickBooks: Premier Retail Edition 2005 which contains customized forms and features to help retailers track and report financial information with fewer errors.

QuickBooks Point of Sale
The S/W can come ala-carte - what you only realy need is a low-end PC/Monitor and a bar code scanner ($200+). Complete H/W package will be around $2K

Software/Hardware Package We've teamed QuickBooks Point of Sale with four "must-have" retail hardware peripherals that work together to help you ring up sales and track inventory faster, more easily, and more accurately. You get all this in one economically priced package:

QuickBooks Point of Sale: Basic 5.0 Tracks inventory and customer information automatically as you ring up sales on your PC.
Cash Drawer Lockable drawer opens automatically when you complete a sale.
Receipt Printer Automatically print a sales receipt each time you complete a sale. Prints duplicate slips for credit card signature and gift receipts.
Bar Code Scanner Easily ring up sales and receive items into inventory by scanning barcodes instead of entering information manually.
Credit Card Reader Process credit card transactions as fast as cash sales. One swipe enters the credit card information into the Point of Sale software where it's automatically submitted for approval.