Show Me the Money
Running any small business is a high-wire circus act of cash management. You can earn solid profits, but run out of cash and get forced into some nasty decisions.
As small manufacturer, with a necessary investment in raw goods inventory, this balancing act is even tougher than most other types of businesses. Too little inventory on-hand and your production process is hampered, too much inventory and all your cash is used up and sitting on the shelf as material.
What’s it all worth?
When you first login to Off The Shelf, you are greeted with reminder of how much money is invested in materials today.
Dashboard
Each business is different, so the comfortable inventory level is going to vary for everyone. Keeping the value front and center keeps you in tune with changes to one of your key metrics. If that number is skyrocketing upward, was that planned to meet an expected surge in demand? If the number plummets, are you going to be caught short for production?
Of course, knowing one big number doesn’t give you the whole story. Is that inventory value concentrated in a single expensive component, or spread across thousands of small parts? From the reports tab, you can dig deep into the details. Off The Shelf is always tracking the changes in stock levels in an audit log, so you can view the inventory value for today, or any previous point in time.
The report columns are sortable. If you sort by Extended Cost, you can instantly see your material with the highest shelf value. From here, you can also export the report to Excel for further analysis, or grab a PDF for printing.
Straw to gold
Knowing inventory value is great, but ultimately you need to turn those assets into revenue. From the Dashboard, clicking on What Can I Build will run a report that shows all products that are sitting on open sales orders and currently buildable with the stock on-hand. This helps prioritize your production queue to churn the Build-To-Order items that are ready for manufacturing. You’ve spent the money, received the parts, now all that standing in the way of shipping the order and invoicing your customer is some elbow grease!
What can I build?
Wrap up
Off The Shelf gives you immediate, clear visibility into your inventory value, historic reporting, and aides in determining production priority. Having this knowledge at the ready keeps your team focused on the objective: turn parts into products, turn products into profit!