Feature of the Month: Stock Ordering

For those salons that have a large retail section, whether these be creams, hair serums, moisturising sachets and so on, our software has a built-in HQ stock ordering system that helps to speed up and improve the accuracy of managing your retail products.

Whether you are a single or multi-site salon, we have implemented a thorough system, where an order can be made from the salon itself by any employee, quickly and simply. If you are already familiar with our stock management system, you will remember that we have a ‘low stock quantity’ field (where this amount is chosen by the salon owner) and then we also have a ‘default re-stock quantity field’ for easy re-ordering.

The benefits of these fields with our system is that once a certain product reaches its low stock quantity level, when an employee comes to make a stock order they can simply click ‘autofill’ and the default re-stock amount will be ordered automatically.

Once the employee then submits this order, it then has to be ‘accepted’ by a head office member. So, for example, if they don’t have the adequate amount of stock at HQ in order to send the required amount to the salon, they can then pick & amend this order accordingly, before actually processing it.

If the correct amount of stock is there at the HQ, then a member of staff at HQ will set the order to ‘accepted’ and then this moves on to be picked from the warehouse.

During the picking stage, there is another checklist that requires the staff member organising the stock from the warehouse to double-check the amount before signing the paperwork off to send the stock into ‘transit-mode’. This is so there are no areas where the stock is unattended, or hasn’t been checked, in order to ensure accuracy is maintained throughout the whole stock ordering process, from order to delivery. Also then ensuring that no malicious behaviours can happen, as if there are any anomalies identified at any time, the sign-off reports at each stage of the stock order; 
Salon order > HQ acceptance > warehouse pick > in-transit > delivery
It is then easy to identify where the variances are happening and this can be resolved accordingly. 

Once the stock is in transit, this then has to be re-counted again by the delivery driver, to take responsibility for the stock on driving before it is delivered at the salon premises. Again, this is part of the process of double-checking, in order to ensure stock accuracy is 100%.

This is then delivered successfully to the shop, where whoever the staff member at the salon is taking the stock order in, they also then have to re-count and sign for their stock to make sure everything is as it says against the order, proving that there isn’t anything missing (or too much of an item also).

Once the salon is happy with the order, this can then be amended and saved in the products section of the software, in which this the auto-updates the amounts on the stock control list so that the salon stock is correct for the next retail purchases.

If that’s been a little difficult to follow – here’s some screen shots below to help you to identify the stock ordering journey. 

Step 1 - Auto-fill stock order from default re-stock quantity using stock management order form

Step 2 - Order form is sent to & then accepted by HQ if they have correct stock

Step 3 - Head office count & pick stock from warehouse ready to send - then move in to 'transit' for delivery

Step 4 - Order is delivered to salon, staff member accepting stock has to check & mark that they have correct amount

Step 5 - Once salon staff accepts stock & is happy with quantity, stock management system auto-updates values

Our stock management feature is included on the Professional package & above, with HQ ordering being part of our online Enterprise package. Sound like this could help your salon? Download your free trial at www.salontracker.co.uk/freetrial.aspx.

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