Understanding the Complexities of Inventory Management in SMEs

Xero’s own IM features

Xero helps businesses manage their inventory efficiently with easy-to-use features:

• Track and Value Stock: Keep an eye on inventory levels and know how much your stock is worth.
• Sales Trend Reporting: Analyze sales trends to make smarter inventory decisions.
• Add Inventory Items to Invoices: Easily include inventory items in your invoices and update stock automatically.
• Integration with Bookkeeping and Invoicing: Sync inventory with bookkeeping and invoicing for smooth operations.
• Xero App Store for Additional Inventory Applications: Customize your inventory management with more apps from Xero’s store.

For businesses that require basic inventory management, Xero’s own features has got you covered and so there’s no need to subscribe to a separate product.

Beyond Xero’s inventory management features

For businesses with complex or niche inventory management needs, Xero can be integrated with a large number of enterprise level apps that are geared to support their unique purposes. This is convenient for businesses that are already existing users of their own Inventory management systems and want a robust accounting system that would seamlessly integrate with it in the background.

Why integrate inventory management with accounting?

Integrating inventory management with accounting systems like Xero helps small businesses save time and work more efficiently. It eliminates manual tasks, reduces errors, and improves inventory control. By connecting these systems, businesses can better track stock, order the right quantities, and avoid running out of products or having too much inventory. It ultimately leads to smoother operations, increased profitability, and happier customers.

Efficiency, accuracy and good outcomes shown through industrial examples

Here’s some examples on how you can benefit from integrating your inventory management system with Xero:

Integration with Shopify

For E-commerce businesses that are using Shopify, you can connect your Shopify store to your Xero account. 

This allows you to reconcile payouts automatically, providing you with clear visibility of fees, costs, and discounts associated with your business transactions, on your Xero dashboard.

Benefits of integrating Shopify with Xero:

• Daily insights: Summaries of your Shopify sales orders for each payment gateway are seamlessly sent to Xero, making reconciliation effortless.
• Consolidated cash flow tracking: Obtain a comprehensive understanding of your business performance by tracking cash flow and utilising Xero’s insightful tools, all in one place.

Integration with inFlow

For businesses in warehousing, assembly, or wholesale that are existing users of inFlow, this integration synchronises bills, invoices, and inventory assets created on InFlow to your Xero dashboard. Synchronising allows for real-time inventory tracking and this is especially revoluntionary for operations that are 24/7 like in the warehousing or assembly industry. Being able to accurately forecast and budget based on demands, and prevents hinderances like stockouts or overstocking. It will also enable a clear picture of the business’ financial health during critical periods or big organisation transformation. 

Integration with Katana for manufacturing businesses

For manufacturers that are doing on-demand small-medium scale manufacturing, having an ERP that connects your supply chain – from sales to delivery – enhances the responsiveness of your operations. If you use softwares like Katana, you’ll be happy to know that Xero has an integration for Katana too. Your Sales and Purchase Orders can be pushed to Xero as Invoices and Bills, and be viewable on Katana platform with syncronised reference numbers. Our team at SCS can help with setting these integrations and even create a bill of material (BOM) for each of your products to make tracking these cashflow in Xero simpler daily. 

And many more…

Xero offers a range of other capabilities that can be integrated with your inventory management system, depending on your specific business requirements.

Try out Xero for yourself!

Unlock the potential of Xero for your organisation today. Our team at SCS enable businesses to get started right by customising their Xero experience with the right suite of apps and accounting setup. Whether this means creating your inventory system with Xero’s features or integrating it with an existing app, we’re excited to move you in the right direction.

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