When you sell bikes or basketballs, it’s simple to track your inventory. You have a certain number of units. You sell one. You have one fewer of those units. With bakeries, things can get a little more complicated, and fast. Luckily the best mobile POS systems are offering better cloud-based solutions that work great for bakeries and their unique inventory headaches.
It’s been estimated that nearly half of businesses don’t really track their inventory, or use a manual method for keeping track of things. It can be assumed that there are some people who do well in their manual inventory tracking; it can also be assumed that a big chunk of those that are using pad-and-pencil methods are being human, and are therefore making little errors. And it can also be assumed that everyone who uses manual methods are taking longer than those who are benefitting from an integrated software-based approach.
Bakeries have the unique inventory issue of needing to track units sold (i.e. number of red velvet cupcakes sold) as well as needing to track ingredients. Both inventories inform your daily operations, because you have to know when to reorder from your supplier, and you have to know how frequently to bake this or that item, and how many batches to make for each go. What’s more, throughout the process, you lose inventory—such as what happens when a tray of cookies gets overbaked and can’t be sold. Inventory management systems have the customizability to track this.
All this means that if you own a bakery, you will be especially punishing yourself with tedious labor by doing manual inventory. There’s a better way. There are also many options out there, including eHopper, which works well with Poynt, which has our vote for the best mobile POS system. By leveraging automations, and also integrating those automations into the normal payment processes, saving you time.
How much time, you might be tempted to ask?? One bit of research estimated just that, and noted that 39% reported that they saved 5 hours or more per week—even more surprisingly, 16% reported that they saved as much as a whole day in the week, just by making the switch. That’s hours and hours that can be re-invested into growing the business.
Inventory management, as we see, can be the breakthrough that gives your bakery—or other business—the staying power it needs. But it all comes down to having the best mobile POS system you can find so that you are set up to run with these integrated payment tools. Moolah opens you up to this possibility by keeping you grounded with superior payment processing, and also offering you great tech options, like the Poynt POS. Start there, and you’ll have everything you need to get the bread to your neighborhood and beyond.