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An Overlooked Aspect of Inventory Management
Originally published Wednesday, Jul 26, 2017
The floral industry is all about flowers, right? Well yes, mainly about flowers but when you are a floral wholesaler or retailer you have many other aspects to consider. One of them is hard goods which are usually overlooked due to the fact that flowers are perishable goods and require far more care so there is a tendency to focus mostly on fresh cuts.
Hard goods and fresh cut flowers behave differently as far as procurement, aging, management, storage, etc. So, why treat them as a single inventory? Our platform takes that into account and handles both types of inventory completely different! Especially by giving you flexibility when it comes to how you buy and sell these products as you may purchase them for internal production but sell them as part of a bouquet or as units.
From the Setup Onward
Being able to discriminate between both types of inventory is crucial. You’ll want to differentiate which items are flowers/plants on one end and non-perishables on the other. Now, using spreadsheets to keep track of your inventory and then dividing the two types can get really messy, so Komet’s platform lets you add hard goods as a specific type of inventory.
When you decide to begin managing hard goods, you’ll want to activate the setting that allows you to do so. Enabling it will let you to set up categories and subcategories for your hard goods and then associate them to your individual items. You can setup a discount for quantity purchased or percentage and additional charges on each hard good.
Buying Hard Goods
The procurement process for hard goods may be different for everyone but, in general, you don’t find many of your customers placing orders in advance for vases or foam, it’s more of an internal requirement or an on-the-go purchase. That’s why Komet let’s you add this type of inventory directly into the system or add them to a Standalone Purchase Order. In either case, you’ll be establishing a cost, price, vendor and quantity for each product so that the platform can keep correct track of all your products. Remember that if you don’t add a price, the system will still calculate the landed cost and GPM based on your settings to suggest a final price for your hard goods.
Selling Hard Goods
If you have customers like florists or retailers that simply buy your hard goods, creating a regular order will suffice; although these products come in boxes, the system will let you sell them by units if needed. But since that’s seldom the case, you can also associate hard goods to a specific box type so that when an order is being placed for that box type, the hard goods you have associated to it will automatically be included when it’s being invoiced.
Also, if you use your hard goods to create your own bouquets and sell them that way, the system has the option to create recipes where you can add hard goods, materials and labor to create your bouquets and it will calculate the cost taking into account the individual costs of all its components.
It’s a simple inventory management solution for something that is so frequently overlooked! By following a simple setup, you can properly allocate costs of hard goods in recipes, track your inventory and sell in units.
