Remember when shops would pop a notice in the window saying, ‘Closed today and tomorrow for annual stock taking’? That was the one time in the whole year that they had an accurate sense of their assets. And December is a little late in the year to realise you’re sitting on €100,000 in unsold size 7 sandals, or whatever the equivalent is in your sector. It was a terribly wasteful way to run a business, leading to expirations and wastage on the one hand and stock-outs on the other.
Lots of retail businesses have moved forward to more efficient stocktaking methods, but plenty are still relying on paper records or a spreadsheet – both of which require a physical count of inventory and are subject to error. With the diversity of sales channels available today (retail outlets, ecommerce sites, social media, marketplace platforms, and more), having accurate inventory information for your products has never been more important.
Ineffective inventory management can impact your cash flow, customer experience, and ultimately your bottom line. If you’re still struggling with stock control, it could be time to invest in your operational efficiency by switching to one of the powerful inventory management platforms on the market. We have lots of clients who manage inventory, and a few of them have integrated Unleashed. I talked to one of our clients, Ronan Farrell of WineLab, about their experience.
What is Unleashed inventory management software?
First, what is Unleashed? It’s a cloud-based integrated platform designed to provide accurate, real-time visibility over your inventory, helping businesses to reduce costs and increase profit. Unleashed offers product businesses the ability to make, manage, and move products more effectively by providing precise tracking of suppliers, production, warehouses, and sales. You can also track stock in real-time across various locations.
Key features of Unleashed include online bills of materials, supplier management, and serial and batch tracking, which simplify the audit process. It is used by manufacturers, retailers, and wholesalers globally and is rated among the top inventory and supplier management software solutions.
Unleashed also handles smart tasks such as automatically adjusting stock levels, tracking expiry dates, and suggesting optimal times and quantities for new stock purchases, helping to reduce stock levels, cut holding costs, and prevent stock write-offs and shortages. The system is built around giving good business insights, with in-depth operational reports and business intelligence dashboards.
Does Unleashed integrate with Xero?
Yes. Unleashed is a cloud application and integrates with around 30 different software tools, including popular platforms like Xero, QuickBooks, Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, and Amazon. You can explore possible integrations on their App Marketplace. There is also a Mobile Sales App that gives salespeople access to stock data when they are on the road.
Why did WineLab choose Unleashed?
I asked Ronan, who is the founder and co-owner of WineLab, what inventory challenges he was facing before Unleashed.
“Our business is relatively complex because we sell a product that is subject to excise duty. When a case of wine is imported, the duty on it is suspended, placed in a tax warehouse, and later cleared. Any given product therefore has two product codes, depending on whether it is duty paid or duty suspended (also known as bonded). Our old accounting software struggled to give us good reporting on this, meaning there was a lot of manual number crunching whenever we wanted to calculate our gross profit. Every month would have to export the data and create a product-based profit & loss statement in a spreadsheet.”
Duct tape solutions like this are never the solution. If a system can’t give you real-time reporting in a few quick clicks, you aren’t setting yourself up for success (see our blog about how real-time data helps you run your business proactively). Without accurate inventory data, it’s challenging to make informed decisions regarding purchasing, sales strategies, and business growth planning.
Ronan continued, “What attracted me to Unleashed when I looked at the solutions available was it could handle duty out of the box. They had lots of clients in the UK selling alcoholic beverages, and it was clear from my conversations with them that they absolutely understood the complexity we have, and they already knew how the software would help with that.
“Duty is a complexity in our business, but so is the way we create our products. As you know, wine is usually shipped as boxes of six bottles. For our B2B customers in the hospitality industry, units are simply boxes of six bottles. But on our ecommerce site, which serves a B2C market, we sell collections – six different bottles in a box. From an inventory perspective, this means that one ecommerce box is reducing six different stock units by one-sixth and creating a whole new product. So that’s something that can be set up on Unleashed.”
Handling ecommerce sales using Unleashed
For its B2B sales, WineLab deals directly with the customer by text or email. But B2C sales happen on WineLab’s Shopify-powered website. We have lots of ecommerce clients who use Shopify, given it’s one of the top three ecomm platforms globally. But many of them still manage their stock manually or rely on manually moving data between Shopify and other systems they use. Integrating systems is harder that you might think and needs careful consideration (see our blog on building an accounting system around your ecommerce site).
I asked Ronan how the different systems worked together to streamline fulfilment at WineLab.
“Now that we’re used to working with Unleashed on the inventory side, we’ve made some changes to how our Shopify connects with Unleashed. What we have now is a system where new website orders are sent to Unleashed, which generates the materials required to prepare the order. Once the order is packed, we complete it on Unleashed and that information goes back to Shopify, which generates the shipping elements needed and then sends the financial information about the sale into the Xero. That’s big jump forward in efficiency for us. There was a bit of work involved in setting that all up, but I managed to get it sorted out over a couple of weeks.”
How has WineLab benefitted from using Unleashed?
“Before moving to Unleashed, we never really had stock accuracy. Now, we have an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) link with our warehouse, giving us live inventory information whenever we need it. That’s important for us because we hold a huge amount of stock at any time. Now we have full visibility of our margins, which we can slice by product, by sales rep, or by customer. We can also segment data to look at things such as customer type (bars, restaurants, hotels, etc.) or geography. So, we have really drillable analytics now and that has enabled us to create a list of KPIs we can track our performance on.
“Another benefit is that we can accurately predict our stock. I used to have to do this in a spreadsheet, and I’d lose half a day (and my mind) working on predictions. Using the Advanced Inventory Module, Unleashed can identify patterns and adjust for seasonality. You can set your minimum and maximum stock levels and forecast demand for a future period of 3, 6, 9, or 12 months. We are still unlearning our old habits of doing all this manually, but Unleashed is allowing us to predict our stock, identify sticky stock, and manage rotations better, and we’re not even using all the functionality yet. I’d say it’s revolutionised how we view our business.”
If you’re wondering whether Unleashed would be a good fit for your business, they have lots of information on their website, including this benefits overview and lots of use cases from different industries.
If you’d like to know more about WineLab, visit their website or check out our recent case study where Ronan talks about WineLab’s innovative way of packaging wine and the role of technology and outsourcing in the business.
