Open Source Inventory Management

Scenario 1: Customer calls you for a product. You don’t know if you have that product in stock.

Scenario 2: Customer calls for a product, you know you have that product in stock, but you can’t locate that product.  

In both these scenarios, you are bound to lose the customer as well as the business offered by the customer. Hence, you need a system that will help you know what you have in stock as well as where you that stock. And inventory management system helps you keep track of your inventory and its location.  

You do not have to go broke to invest in this software. There are many open source inventory management (OSIM) software available in the market especially for small and medium size businesses.  These software solutions offer a variety of features some of which are limited in numbers, for example, the number of reports that you can generate or number of users who can use the system and other such limitations. But by and large, most of the OSIM software offers you more than what you need to fulfil your business requirements.  

To begin with you, OSIM offers you simple inventory tracking feature. You know what you have in stock at any given time by using movement history. Some software solutions offers you double entry inventory system where the operations are about stock moving between locations. Here you don’t have to worry about stock input, output or transformation.   

When you are running low on a product, the software lets you know about that too. This is because the software is integrated with Purchase module so it automatically triggers a stock low request to your suppliers.  This way you are able to track your selling as well as purchasing of products.  OSIM automatically updates the system when a sale is made.  

You can organize your products by defined categories and locations. At any given point in time, you have all the information readily available: how much do you have in stock, the stock available at each location, orders placed for low inventory and much more. Further, on a single screen you are able to see what is ready for shipping, for invoicing and for payment.  

Work together on orders with your whole team, customers and your vendors. The system offers you multi user mode where everyone is connected to the same database and can work from it together. It saves time as there is no going back and forth with emails. Moreover, let OSIM do all the math for you. It automatically calculates all the taxes, costs, currencies and unit of measure. Other calculations it does for you includes cost of goods sold, value of inventory on hand, your profit margin and overall sales figures.  

Further, no more paperwork as OSIM manages all your invoices, sales and purchase orders, packing slips, shipping labels and much more.  It provides you dynamic reporting feature that gives you thorough insight and help you in your decision making process. You can customize your dashboard to see your cash flow, profits, costs, and much more and analyze your business efficiency. And you can also generate real time reports that can be shared with your team.  

Enhance your branding by printing and emailing customized invoices, shipping labels, sales and purchase orders to your vendors and customers. OSIM offers you barcode scanning feature and this allows you to improve your inventory’s accuracy. Integrate with third party accounting packages to manage your data and accounting needs. Some OSIM also offers you advanced features such as drop shipping and cross docking.