RMS Inventory count with laptop and USB scanner

Have you Looked at New West's Physical inventory tool?

You're blaming RMS for you letting your $2000 handheld get stolen?!?

Single stores don't need an internet connection for anything regarding RMS, including inventory. I only have one store, so I don't do HQ, but I'm not sure why you would need an internet connection there either for the actual physical inventory?

Inventory is a major pain in the ass no matter how it's done (unless you pay someone else to do it :-) ) so doing it in RMS is no different; and there are several things they could improve obviously. But I had no problems with wireless connectivity while doing it, although that could be different in each scenario. And just like losing one's handheld; it's not caused, or made worse, by RMS. The quality of your network is what's important there. Another important component that would effect speed and quality of scans would be the scanner itself and how it's configured. Cheap out in that department and you could be pulling your hair out by the end of the day. I know, because I bought a $49 USB scanner thinking it wouldn't matter.......WRONG! Buy a decent one and save yourself a headache.

Also, do your inventory in small batches if you can, by department, bin, category, or something like that. It makes life much easier, because in the event of a network hiccup you will lose a lot less work, making yourself a lot less aggravated. I have also found it easier to assign one person to do inventory from start to finish because they know what places they have already been to count making errors less likely.

I don't know if I've been as helpful as Jason, but good luck on doing your inventory. I know it's my least favorite aspect of running a store.

Craig

Craig

I can tell you it is not very easy. We tried to do it in our grocery store a few times and gave up. Some of this issues we had were:

1. We would scan and count a bunch of items and then loose internet connection and SO would crash losing everything before we saved.
2. The quickscan did not always work well (although i cannot remember why offhand). It may have been there were just too many clicks needed on the laptop after you scanned that it just didn't make sense because it was so slow.
3. If you have inventory in 2 places its hard to deal with in RMS because it only knows 1 inventory. If you rescan the item it will overwrite the count you made before so if you counted the basement then came upstairs to count the shelf you would loose your count from downstairs.

What RMS needs is a simple screen where you 1. scan item 2. put in count 3. SAVE. It doesn't do that though.

There are some tools like the ones from Newestech that can help but in our experience we also had connection problems and eventually our handheld got stolen so we gave up on that too ($2000 down the drain for software and hardware).

Doing inventory is such a major pain with RMS and was one of the many reasons I decided to start from scratch and build ShopKeep.com.

Jason Richelson GreeneGrape.com and ShopKeep.com

Another option: If a flaky wireless connection is a problem, you can scan to a file, then import the file into physical inventory.

Marc

You can put access point all over the store and use N router It has more range.