Barcodes have marked their place everywhere starting from daily use items to food, medications, till patient's wristbands at the hospitals. They have proved their significance from the time they were invented (in 1949).

Approximately everyone has seen a barcode on one product or another, but all do not pay that much attention to it, as important it is for its dealers (manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, etc.).

Whenever the barcodes are talked about, automatically an image of supermarket shopping may arise in your mind, which is substantially correct as you have seen the majority of barcode scanning there, that too your entire life.

But have you imagined, what can barcodes do for your small business?

What do you use to track your business inventory and sales?

Ever wondered what objective you can track with barcodes in your small business?

What can Barcoding do?

Starting from what barcodes are?

Barcodes are the alphanumeric code that can be scanned to the computer and the system software will tell you the details of the product.

The system will give you those details only when you have saved them on a platform. That means for barcoding you need to pre-load the details into your database.

Also Read: Why Your Business Needs an Asset Management System?

Barcoding helps you in:

• Automatic check of customers, that too quickly.
• Scanning of barcodes is a fast feed of data as compared to hand feed registers.
• You can make changes in pricing easily just by making a change in the software at any time and the barcode will reflect the change simultaneously.
• Re-order of the same product for a new batch for a merchant, just by entering the needed quantity.
• Track invoices sent and payment received from the customers.
• Track employee hours (attendance), by assigning barcode tagged IDs to your employees.

How Barcoding is important to your small business?

It does not matter how big or small your business is when it comes to managing your business inventory.

If your business has an inventory, you're in a need to manage it, monitor it, secure it.

For this, a barcode system will help you at its best with your inventory management.

A barcode inventory system can help you in a brilliant way by increasing your efficiency in important ways. It can also help you save lots of time and money in all the areas of your business.

Actually, inventory management is an essential part of any business either it is big or small! Not only in earlier times but today also it is possible to manage and track inventory by hand or spreadsheets but using a barcode inventory system is much efficient in the long run.

Benefits of Barcoding in small business:

1. The key benefit of a barcode inventory system is time-saving.
   
2. Barcodes can reduce the number of errors inside the inventory records.
   
3. With the use of barcodes, you can decrease the scale of missed sales, over and under scale inventory, making it directly impact on your business profits and its growth.
   
4. Barcodes help you operate more real-time inventory movements; this enables you to manage the whole supply chain which goes from the raw materials to the final distribution of the product.
   
5. The real-time barcode inventory management provides you the control over all records and allows the cost approvals at each stage, making it easy for accounting and tax reporting.
   
6. Barcoding can also come up with risk management strategies in small businesses, significantly decreasing the administrative burden.

Also Read: 7 Most Common Methods Used for Asset Tracking

Why use Barcode System?

Following are a few reasons why a barcode system is a good idea for small businesses:

1. Less Risk of Error:

The manual entry of data in computer systems is more unguarded in terms of inaccuracies. Leading to the inaccuracy of wrong pressed keys for tracking a package, calling a customer, making it a huge risk.

Barcode systems will help you is reducing such unwanted errors.

2. Time-Saving:

The data entered manually is a time-consuming process. Today's technology is speeding toward making less time-consuming software and systems. So, everybody should also grow with time, for time.

Barcoding is such a time-saving system, it does not need a manual entry for data to get stored in the software, instead, it just requires scanning of the barcode tag.

3. Less Operational Costs:

This is the result of the popularity of barcodes that it has lowered the cost of the required equipment. It just gets you one-time investment with the purchase of machines and equipment and after that what remains is their repairing, management, and maintenance.

This will benefit you in time head providing you more accurate data which helps you re-evaluating the expenses.

4. Fewer Expenses:

As discussed, more accurate data more it will help you re-evaluate the expenses.

For instance, if we talk about warehouse space, overestimating the inventory in terms of quantity and cost, both, the false assumption will cause you unnecessary money.

5. Easy Update of Pricing:

Making changes in pricing brings a huge headache, like how to implement it, how to penalize it, how to fix things accordingly, etc. It also takes time-consuming and labor-intensive process, to have price tags affixed to your products.

Use of barcodes will lead you display price on barcode tag on the product shelving. Thus, the method will require less time and labor by reducing time and labor consumption in changing price tags on each item, changes made in shelf signage just by recording data once in the barcode database.

6. Easy Track of Inventory:

The tracking of inventory is easy with the barcode system as you just need to scan the asset barcode tag to get any kind of information about the product, inventory, or asset. Right from its manufacturing to its distribution.

The barcode has just made the task and tool easy going making it efficient more than any time.

7. Overall Inventory Management:

Not only tracking but related activities, like details addition, scheduled maintenance of machinery, the record of shelf life of tools and equipment, etc. Barcode system is raised for doing all this single-handedly, improving business profits till heights.

8. Easy Accounting:

You can fulfill the needs of accounting too with a barcode system, as it helps you update data of manufacturing units till distribution units in an easy go, from equipment maintenance to update of pricing tags and details.

You have a sum of all details and data just with the scanning of barcode asset tags. Making your accounts easy and efficient to manage.

Conclusion:

The barcode system is very efficient for any business. But for small businesses, it will only enhance your profits by reducing errors in data and details, maintenance and accounting, productivity and sales.

All the loops are there within the organizations' sectors, barcode tracking system helps to reduce those loops of defame and degradation making your data accurate and real-time.