Managing liquor store inventory is kind of like managing a successful sports team.
At any given moment, you need to know who your top performers are, who’s sick or injured, and who’s been scoring the most points for the team recently.
Having this information allows you to put the best players in the game at the right moment to maximize your chance of winning.
Now imagine you had to manage your team with an incomplete roster and inaccurate player stats, and instead of having a dozen players on the team, you had a thousand.
That’s what it’s like to operate a liquor store without a modern inventory management system, making it nearly impossible to know who’s “playing well” on your team.
Liquor store owners have an extremely difficult job when it comes to inventory tracking and management.
There are thousands of products to track, hundreds of orders to place, and dozens of places the system can fail along the way.
In this article, we’re going to look at how you can use a smart liquor store POS system to manage your roster of bottles like a winning coach would.
We’ll talk about managing stock levels, tracking incoming deliveries, and maximizing efficiency.
If done correctly, you’ll be able to lead your liquor store from the middle of the pack to the front — you’ll be a real league contender.
A Brief Guide to Managing Liquor Store Inventory
There are several things that make managing liquor store inventory difficult. At the top of the list? The time it takes.
Liquor store owners and operators across the country spend hours every month counting and sorting inventory, adding it to their system, and purging their products looking for dead stock.
Many of them do it through multiple different systems. This takes extra time — but more importantly, it allows mistakes (such as double ordering) to happen more often.
Another inventory challenge is keeping track of all the different ways products are packaged. You have individual bottles, four-packs, six-packs, cases, cartons, boxes, and flats.
You’re also managing inventory levels for each category: beer, wine, liquor, mixers, and ready-to-drink cocktails.
Without the right system in place, it’s no wonder liquor store owners spend so much time and effort managing inventory.
Today’s article will break inventory management down into three categories:
- Managing stock levels more accurately in less time
- Strategic reordering to increase profitability
- Maximizing efficiency with minimal effort
This article will also offer suggestions on how to leverage your POS system to do each of them better.
Let’s get started.
Part 1: Managing Stock Levels More Accurately in Less Time
Managing stock effectively means you have enough stock so that your customers find what they need, while avoiding over or understocking items.
Customers will eventually become frustrated if they come to your store and can’t find what they want because you’re understocked.
As the owner, you’ll also become frustrated if you have a thousand bottles of vodka, but you’re only selling ten per week.
At that rate, it would take two years to sell through your current stock.
Your liquor store POS system should be able to track inventory in real time, which gives you a better handle on what’s happening in the store so you can make informed purchasing decisions.
You also need the ability to track cases and individual bottles within those cases.
If you have a case of twelve bottles of wine and a customer purchases two of them, it shouldn’t throw off your inventory system or cause you any trouble whatsoever.
Being able to monitor your inventory levels by the individual bottle, case, or both is like a sports manager having an accurate and up-to-date roster.
You need to know who’s on the team at all times.
But how do you know who’s playing well?
The Bottle POS system can help by ranking your top-selling products and grading them A-B-C-D. It can also color code each item so you can quickly see which products are performing well for your store.
Having accurate and up-to-date information about how many bottles you have, as well as which bottles are performing the best, allows you to excel at the next part of inventory management — strategic reordering.
Want to see a demo of how Bottle POS does this? Book yours today!
Part 2: Strategic Reordering to Increase Profitability
With all of your bottles properly accounted for and ranked, you can start reordering strategically.
For example, your POS system could automatically reorder your top-selling products when the inventory got down to a certain level.
This would prevent you from running out of top-selling products, and ensure you keep your customers happy.
Auto reordering can also solve “forgetful manager syndrome,” and prevent ordering the same products twice.
A smart POS system can also predict how much of which products to order during what season.
Basically, it acts like the statistician on a baseball team.
How great would it be if your system knew that summer was approaching and you’d need to order X cases of chardonnay based on last year’s numbers?
With a POS system that’s integrated with hundreds of distributors nationwide, and by making smart decisions based on previous sales patterns, you can bet your store will have exactly what your customers want, when they want it.
Part 3: Maximizing Efficiency with Minimal Effort
You don’t have to maximize your effort in order to maximize the efficiency of your store.
Sometimes you can simply use technology to do a few things automatically.
For example, when a product shipment arrives at your store, you can simply scan the invoice and the inventory will be automatically added to your POS system, so you don’t waste hours of time scanning products and adding them manually.
Instead of constantly roaming your store looking for dead stock or low inventory, you can trust Bottle POS to alert you of either instance.
Imagine a sports coach who had a pen and paper in hand for each game and manually kept track of all the players' stats.
How hard would it be for them to keep accurate stats and build a winning strategy around that system?
Your goal as the store operator should be to use the stats given to you from your smart POS system to look for opportunities to reduce costs, increase sales, or both.
A POS system can help you do that without having to be physically present at the store. You can manage inventory remotely, and build your winning strategy from home, while the rest of your team looks after the store.
Some of our favorite auto features to save time and maximize efficiency are:
- Auto ranking. Quickly identify which brands are driving your sales vs. which are overstocked or dead stock. Bottle POS auto ranking grades all of your items on an A-B-C-D scale and color codes them based on sale patterns.
- Auto-generating purchase orders. Automatically create purchase orders for products your store needs as soon as inventory gets too low.
- Auto invoicing received shipments. When inventory arrives at the store, the invoice is automatically imported so you just have to review and finalize it.
Start Managing Your Liquor Store Inventory Like a Winning Sports Manager
Once you have a good handle on your inventory, you can start to analyze top and bottom performers, just like a winning sports manager.
Do you see a bottle that’s consistently underperforming? Cut them from the team.
See a bottle that’s continuously scoring points for the store? Reorder, reorder, reorder.
Winning coaches don’t keep losing players on the team, and winning liquor store operators shouldn’t consistently reorder underperforming bottles.
If you’d like to learn more about how Bottle POS can help you manage your liquor store inventory like a winner, please schedule a demo.
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