New life from Monday: to whom and why to implement inventory control

From February 1, 2021, all entrepreneurs, including micro-businesses, will have to indicate the names of goods in the checks. For this, many of them will switch to inventory accounting. Yulia Litvyakova, Key Account Manager at the IT company Evotor, talks about who will be affected by the innovations, what gives commodity accounting and how to implement it.

New life from Monday: to whom and why to implement inventory control

Alina Aleshchenko

Now, individual entrepreneurs can sell without specifying the name of the goods in the check (except for those selling excisable goods) using PSN, STS, UTII, ESKhN. They can punch the check simply by specifying “Free Position”.

From February 1, all merchants must indicate the following product information on the check:

• name of goods, works, services (if the volume and list of services can be determined at the time of payment),

• their number,

• unit price including discounts and markups.

The requirements for the content of the cash register receipt are detailed in Art. 4.7 ФЗ-54 dated 05.22.2003. Source: Art. 4.7. 54-FZ and 290-FZ p. 7. p. 17 of 03.07.2016

The law does not stipulate strict requirements for the name of goods and there is no single reference book of goods. But there are recommendations from the tax office so that the names of the check are understandable for buyers. At the same time, the field length is only 128 characters. There is also a recommendation by the Ministry of Finance to use the All-Russian Classifier of Products by Type of Economic Activity (letter from the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation No. 03-01-15 / 49971).

For example, the check should indicate: milk 3.2%, grain bread, etc. Also, if an entrepreneur has a group of goods with different names at the same price, for example, lemonade “Baikal”, “Duchess”, you can simply indicate “Lemonade in assortment”.

Penalty for the lack of nomenclature in the check (clause 4 of article 14.5 of the Administrative Code):

• up to 3000 rubles for an official;
• up to 10,000 rubles for individual entrepreneurs or organizations.

For some businesses, implementing these legal requirements will be straightforward. If the product assortment is small, it is enough to enter the nomenclature at the checkout. But if there are more than 100 items of goods at the point of sale, then it makes sense to introduce commodity accounting. It will be labor-intensive for an entrepreneur to enter the entire range of goods / services manually. In addition, work with the item is not completed when the item is created at the checkout. Working with the nomenclature is an ongoing process. The price of the product changes regularly, barcodes are added, promotions, discounts, etc.

Who will it touch?

The change will affect a huge number of entrepreneurs. And those who still work at autonomous checkouts, and those who switched to online checkouts, but did not sell by nomenclature. For example, in the Evotor ecosystem, almost a third of online checkouts do not have a single product item. In checks, they break through the “item / position at a free price”.

We conducted a survey of entrepreneurs who work on “evotor” and hit checks only “at a free price.” It turned out that microbusiness (less than 100 commodity items) among them – only 30%. And a third are stores with a range of 100-500 items: grocery stores, small catering, household, office supplies, construction stores with a large number of piece goods. And another 37% are stores with a nomenclature of more than 500 items: large household, stationery, construction stores, haberdashery.

Half of the interviewed entrepreneurs admitted that they still keep records of goods in a notebook. And a third (32%) do not keep records at all. Only 11% – use software for accounting of goods, but it is not synchronized with the checkout and information about the goods is not reflected in the receipt. About 7% of respondents keep inventory in Excel.

What does commodity accounting give to an entrepreneur?

• Product analysis

According to reports, the entrepreneur will see which positions sell better and bring more profit, and which ones remain on the shelves. This helps to understand which goods need to be ordered more and which ones can be omitted.

Errors when accounting for goods are immediately visible: duplicates, negative balances, zero prices, goods with a low margin.

• Control of cashiers / employees

All receipts, returns, discounts and goods movements are recorded in the program. The shortage will be revealed at the first inventory.

For example, a customer made a purchase for 500 rubles in cash and left the check at the checkout. The cashier made a return on this check, attached all the necessary documents to the return, and took the money from the cash register for himself. There is no product on the shelf, because there was no real return. The inventory will show the shortage. According to the report on the movement of goods, the entrepreneur will be able to check who exactly returned the goods.

• Working with technological maps. Sale of composite goods

Relevant for catering and small-scale production.

In public catering, maintenance of technical maps is mandatory. Maintaining technical maps in the inventory accounting system allows you to track the costs of purchased ingredients and their consumption, cost. And also do not allow dishes to enter the stop list. For example, in a coffee shop, when selling, the cashier selects the Cappuccino product at the checkout, and everything will be written off from the warehouse in proportion to the technical card drawn up. Integration of technical cards into the inventory system also allows detecting violations and thefts by personnel.

In inventory systems, you can also take into account the sale of old goods. Often, entrepreneurs assemble kits to sell off leftovers, or sell individual ingredients in a composite product. For example, for the holidays, an entrepreneur can collect gift sets from individual goods (running + stale goods). Or, conversely, to unpack the kits received from the supplier into separate items, if the kit is expensive and more likely to buy individual items.

• Warehouse operations

Acceptance of goods, revaluation, write-off, returns, etc.
Inventory accounting systems allow you to remotely revalue goods without involving a cashier. For example, a product has arrived with a new purchase price or has lost its presentation or has not been sold for a long time and the warehouse is overstocked.

• Moving goods between outlets

If the entrepreneur has several outlets and the goods need to be moved regularly between the outlets. Moving will allow you to write off the goods from the balances in store A and capitalize in store B.

• Printing price tags and labels

Inventory accounting systems make it easy to create new price tags, including those with a discount.

Check list. How to automate a point of sale?

Choose an inventory system

Programs and applications for inventory control set. Cost – from 500 rubles per month and more. Programs designed for medium and large retailers can be more expensive.

Consider the following factors:

Business segment. There are universal solutions for small businesses, and there are specialized solutions for a specific segment.

For example, not all programs in the basic version make it possible to take into account composite goods or routings. There are programs specialized for pharmacies and beauty salons.

• Convenient interface and demo version to evaluate how easy it will be for you to use the program.
• Is there a free support service, help with setup and subsequent use?
• Cost. What is the basic functionality of the program, and what is additional? How flexible and customizable is the program?

Top 5 popular commodity accounting programs in Evotor.Market (for small businesses):

1. Assortment management

2. 1C

3. Shop manager

4. Subtotal

5. My warehouse

Enter the nomenclature

• The fastest and easiest way is to request electronic invoice forms in Excel format from suppliers.

• You can also scan barcodes on the product, then the positions will be loaded from the cloud barcode database (the product directory is already preinstalled in the “evotors”).

• If there are no barcodes on the product, you can generate them in the inventory system, print and stick them on the product.

3. Inventory. Enter the current balances into the inventory system

4. Additional equipment for inventory control – barcode scanner (about 2-3 thousand rubles), label printer (5-10 thousand rubles).

5. Sale of goods. The cashier will scan the barcode of the product, the online checkout and the inventory system will record the sale.

6. The transition to inventory control is the basis of business automation. With commodity accounting, you can effectively implement loyalty programs and launch online sales.

Cover photo: titov dmitriy/Shutterstock