When your business is small, you might be able to get away with having a disorganized inventory space. But as your business starts to grow and things get more complicated, if you’re not able to streamline and organize your warehouse or stock rooms, you may find that keeping your business on track will become much harder to do.

To help ensure that this doesn’t happen to you, here are three tips for organizing your business inventory in a useful manner. 

Create A System For Receiving Stock

One of the hardest things to do when trying to stay organized with your business inventory is to manage the big shipments that you receive from your suppliers. 

Without having a good system for this in place, it’s easy to feel like you don’t know where to put the stock you’ve just received. For this reason, you need to come up with some system or process for how you handle receiving stock shipments.

If your shipments are small, you might just need to devote more time to checking, organizing, and storing these items yourself. But if you’re getting a lot of stock that you can’t handle all on your own, you should look for a warehousing solution that will allow you to manage everything from purchase orders to your labeling system and everything in between. 

Embrace Maps And Labels

In smaller storage areas, having a map of your stock likely isn’t going to be a priority of yours. But once you start moving your inventory into a warehouse, you’re going to need to have a solid organization system in place from the get-go.

As part of this, you should try your best to embrace maps of your storage area and labels for each item that makes its way into your inventory space. With these measures in place, it will be much easier for you to know where to store certain items that come in. And when it comes time to fulfill orders, you’ll know exactly where to go to get what you need to be selling or shipping off.

Make It Easy To Cycle Through Old Stock First

For most businesses, it’s going to be important to follow a “first in, first out” rule for cycling through your stock. However, when adding more products to your shelves, it can be much easier to just stick the new stuff in front of the old stuff.

If you’ve been struggling with how to make this system work, you might want to reconfigure your shelves or storage areas so you can easily put your newest products in the back and press your older products up to the front. This reconfiguration could include things like stocking shelves from the side, using step stools to easily reach the back of your shelves, and much more. 

If you’ve been struggling with keep your business inventory organized, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you meet this challenge.