There are many ways to track parts and products. One of the most common ways is by serial number tracking. You might start using a serial number to track the progress of a part/product from the time that the purchase order is received into your inventory.
Monitoring Progress
Once a part/product is assigned a serial number, it can be monitored as it moves through your inventory system. A serial number tracking system helps you to calculate your inventory turnover rate, which enables you to make better decisions in the future while purchasing inventory.
More Serial Number Uses
Serial number tracking is also useful if you create your own parts/products. It allows you to easily find each part/product no matter which stage it might be at in the creation process. This makes it simple to exchange one part for another if needed, find bad parts/products to stop production, and much more. It is also important to use serial numbers for:
- Quality assurance
- Dealing with product recalls
- Addressing warranty claims
- And more
Tracking Success
Efficiently managing your inventory is essential to the financial success of your business whether big or small.
Our inventory management system features serial number tracking capabilities so you can manage your stock and know where it is at all times. For businesses that require that extra level of inventory control, our integrated platform comes with all of the tools you’ll need to effectively buy, sell, receive and track product.
Tighter Inventory Control
For some businesses, inventory control needs to be more detailed and thorough when managing stock levels. Some companies require serialized inventory for tracking their own items, managing product warranties, tracking repairs (see part number tracking) and reducing fraud. If you develop your own products and need to tag and track them, or you’re reselling a product that requires serialized management control, Grit-Global Software’s serial number tracking functionality handles it with ease.
Detailed Tracking Methods
The serial numbers retain all the history, including which purchase order they were received on and which invoice they were sold on. You can then link to the accounts payable bill to get the bill number, supplier and date. From the invoice, you can get the invoice number, date, customer name and selling price.
Selling and Receiving Inventory
With our inventory management software, you can track serial numbers on both the receiving and the selling sides of your business, all with one convenient package. You can flag items in the system that require serial number tracking. When you do this, you must enter the serial numbers of the items as you receive the stock, and again when you sell the items. This way, you’ll have a record for each serialized item that contains:
- When you purchased it
- Who you got it from
- Purchase order number it came in on
- Who you sold it to
- Invoice number
- Date of sale
- How much you paid for it
- How much you sold it for
Serialize at a Later Date
Also of note is that you can sell the item on the invoice without the serial number, and then go back and add it once the item has been picked from the warehouse and delivered to the customer. No more crawling over boxes, trying to match a particular serial number to an invoice.
Serializing at Point of Sale
You have the option of showing serial numbers on a customer invoice. This can be handy for their records, as it helps with things like product registration and warranty claims. Your sales staff will also be able to assign serial numbers when selling or add serial numbers on the fly. Our inventory management software can also auto-select the first serial number in inventory.
In the event of a catastrophic failure with your business server computer, you’ll still be able to sell serialized inventory using our standalone LAN mode. This is a handy backup feature for any inventory management system.
Flexibility When Serializing
Grit-Global Software allow you to automatically generate serial numbers for inventory when receiving stock, as well as bar-codes. Our inventory management program works with both numeric and alpha-numeric numbers. If you choose, you can also enter a prefix for all serial numbers created. This eight-digit prefix can be modified at any time and serial numbers created from that time forward have the new prefix. You also have the option of selecting the number of digits you wish to left-pad the serial number assignments with.
For improved inventory management, we even allows you to attach a barcode to each serial numbered inventory item.
Reducing Human Error
One important option is the ability to enter the number of items to be sold on the invoice before you have selected the serial numbers. This benefits businesses that prefer to have the system force the quantity sold to match the number of serial numbers added to the invoice line. This ensures that the serial numbers are always entered and reduces the opportunity for human error.
Request Demo