Hold Off Ordering Slow Moving Items
Let us suppose that you have an item in stock that has not sold in the last couple of years. Suppose also that you sell that item today. Experience shows that often in this situation, the customer that bought this item made a mistake and the item will be returned. Most store pos systems will order up a stocking item as soon as it is time to reorder. Now if the item is returned, you may have two of the slow moving item in stock because it is hard to return stocking items. MIB has a solution for this problem. You can have MIB hold off ordering slow moving items for several days. After some specified number of days, MIB will order the item if it has not been returned. If an item has not sold in the last couple of years, the chances of selling two of them in several days is slim. In this way you can spend your inventory dollars on items more likely to sell.
Labels: inventory control, slow moving inventory, Store POS System
Making a living While Selling Parts to Repair Shops
A short while ago I was taking with a small jobber store in the Midwest. He said that he didn't want to sell to repair shops. He said that they want you to deliver and then beat you up to get the lowest price, are slow to pay and when all is said and done they go bankrupt and leave you poorer by several thousand dollars. One jobber from the past seemed to have at least part of that under control. He billed his repair shop customers every week. If they didn't pay by the time billing was run on the following week, they were cash only. In today's economy everybody should be doing business that way.
Labels: Auto Part Store Software, Parts store, Store POS System
Control Expenses and Be Successful
This jobber has always been successful running independent automotive jobber stores. Also, he has owned an NAPA store off and on for years. Although it wasn't planned, he ended up owning another NAPA within the last year or so. The previous owners could not make a go of it. The new owner from his past experience felt it was nearly impossible to make a big profit owning an NAPA store. However, he felt that this store could be profitable and he loved a challenge. He did not want to run the store himself so he first sized up the existing manager and decided that he was a good manager. The existing manager remained the store manager. The new owner then went to the store and started going over the expenses. The only expense that was safe was payroll. He was not going to cut payroll. The new owner immediately stopped all deliveries to their customers. Surprisingly, there was only a minor decrease in sales. However, the cost savings on the delivery vehicle and insurance was dramatic. The new owner knew that the repair shops were first calling the mass retailers trying to get the parts they needed at the lowest cost. When only NAPA had the parts that they needed, the repair shops were desperate enough to come over and pick up the parts. The new owner then looked at the telephone expenses and was able to cut their phone bills from $400 a month to $200 a month. Next he cut advertising and many other optional services. Next, he went over every other expense and cut those expenses that were not clearly helping enough to justify their cost. He knew what helped and what didn't from years of owning an NAPA store. He had a couple more expenses that he was watching, but is still testing the effects of these expenses before he makes a firm decision. The new owner knew that he could save another couple of hundred a month by switching from the NAPA pos computer system to MIB, but left that up to the store manager. The store manager decided to keep the NAPA system because he was comfortable with it. The new owner then left the store to the manager. Within a few months the balance for the bank account for the NAPA store started to grow. The new owner then went to the store manager. He explained that if the store continued to be profitable, the manager could expect to see a nice bonus. The new owner liked the money from the NAPA store but being able to turn an unprofitable store into a profitable store is what really made him happy.
The interesting thing about this story is that the only difference between an unprofitable store and a profitable store was the reduced expenses. Everything else remained the same.
