Accurate and reliable tire inventory management is mission-critical to automotive vendors that provide seasonal tire storage management for customers.
As a tire storage solution provider, your success is dependent on how well you can manage inventory. Your customers will count on you to be able to keep accurate records of their tires. After all, they are trusting a vital asset to your safekeeping that affects the performance of their cars and the safety of their occupants.
The Many Demands on Tire Shops for Inventory Management
To confidently safeguard customer trust, you need to correctly record and manage data about their tires in your database so that you can track essential metrics over the seasons and retrieve their property whenever they request it.
Furthermore, you need to be able to search for customer records and retrieve them in a matter of seconds at any given time.
And your staff needs to be able to organize incoming tires with ease, accuracy, and reliability without having to constantly watch out to avoid making simple human errors.
You also need your team to be able to catalogue lots of tires at once if your shop suddenly gets busy, without any time wasted on cumbersome data entry and keyboard tapping.
Additionally, you need to be able to invoice your customers accurately based on your inventory records in seamless connection with your sales software and/or dealer management software.
As well, if you have multiple locations, your team needs to be able to check inventory seamlessly from across your stores without having to email files back and forth.
The demands for a tire inventory management system are many.
Unfortunately, many tire storage providers use spreadsheets such as Excel to accomplish the above tasks. However, as anyone with experience using tire inventory spreadsheets knows, this is not an adequate solution for anything but the smallest of customer bases.
Tire inventory spreadsheets have several significant shortcomings that will inevitably (and repeatedly) cause problems for you and your team, especially as your business grows and you need to scale.
This article will explore tire inventory spreadsheet shortcomings to beware of and how using dedicated tire inventory software will solve each one.
Prevents Common Data Entry Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Data
No matter how proficient an employee is with Excel, they will inevitably make mistakes during data entry.
It is due to basic human error to slip from time to time and miss omissions, especially if repeated inputting across days and weeks. Making a mistake with a spreadsheet is as simple as entering numbers into the wrong row or column once, and it would suffice to render several records inaccurate. Worst of all, the error may not be detected and could cause repeated inaccuracy or confusion down the road for both your team and your customers, with no way of tracking the root of the problem.
Data entry errors with tire inventory spreadsheets are prominent when you have inexperienced users who are not Excel or computer savvy or when there is a need to process data quickly during a busy rush of customers.
Because there is no data entry protection or prevention with spreadsheets, your inventory data is prone to get out of control and become unreliable over time, to the point of being useless and your team having to revert to pen and paper to get things done (to the distress of your customers).
Track Sales History Without Add-on Software
It is impossible to track sales history using tire inventory spreadsheets because they cannot be integrated into sales and dealer management software. Spreadsheets are standalone and operate in isolation from other IT systems. If you change a customer order quantity in your inventory spreadsheet, you would need a separate sales management system to track where the tires went. This creates the need for multiple instances of data entry, which is both a waste of time and a risk for data entry errors.
With tire inventory software, whenever you change sales records, the inventory will be automatically updated.
Search For Tires Using Multiple Criteria
Sometimes you need to look up a specific tire based on multiple criteria that a customer has. A good tire inventory software will allow you to choose based on multiple choices for filtering options, including brands, models, tire specifications, seasonality, and so on. This enables your team to find what the customer is looking for and get closer to closing the sale.
This kind of functionality is more difficult to achieve with tire inventory spreadsheets and, at the very least, requires advanced spreadsheet skills.
Share Data Across Multiple Users, Computers, and Locations
Using a spreadsheet file means that it needs to be stored on a local computer. To share it across multiple computers and even locations would require emailing the file back and forth. And you need to be careful to avoid the same file being overwritten by various users, potentially losing new data.
You could use sophisticated central server solutions that allow access to a central spreadsheet file, but this requires an unnecessary IT setup. Why not invest the time and money into a dedicated tire inventory software that does the same job much better and many other functions that a spreadsheet could never provide?
Avoid Frustrated Customers Due to Excess Wait Times
When your staff cannot quickly lookup records of stored tires or perform fast searches for purchase inquiries based on exact customer needs, it means wait times for your customers. Whether over the phone or across the counter, unnecessary waiting while your employees grapple with tire inventory spreadsheets can cause frustration and even make the customer wonder why you do not have a better system.
Excess wait times are bad for customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
Tire inventory software allows quick searches and record access, drastically reducing wait times.
Eliminate the Need for Cumbersome Manual Data Entry
With tire inventory software, you have the option of integrating your computer systems with specialized hardware that allows for easy data entry. This isn’t easy to accomplish with tire inventory spreadsheets. It would require complex configurations and additional hardware purchases that may be a hit or miss. Tire inventory software often is compatible out of the box with handheld scanners and label printers, which means you can get up and running right away with everything you and your team need for accurate and hassle-free data entry.
Saves Time and Hassle to Focus on Your Business
Instead of dealing with cumbersome inventory spreadsheets and their inherent (and unresolvable) problems, you will be able to train your team quickly with tire inventory software so that everyone is working efficiently on inventory management. You can focus on growing your business instead of dealing with corrupted data, tracing the cause, and putting out fires all the time.
Less stress for you. Less stress for your staff. Less hassle for your customers.
Everyone will be more at peace, and your business will be more organized and run better.
—-
What makes Tire Storage Solutions unique:
- Seasonal tire management
- Comes with hardware like a barcode scanner
- Creates QR codes for every tire
We offer a turnkey solution that can be implemented within days. Request a Demo now.