Salesforce inventory management: basic techniques

What is Salesforce

Customer relationship management (CRM) software typically manages all of your business's customer information in one place. Salesforce is a global industry leader in customer management software which, in their words, has been:

How to hack Salesforce to manage basic inventory management

• Create field service locations for places where your inventory is stored, such as warehouses, so you can keep track of all your stock and avoid stockout situations.
• Configure your inventory settings, such as page layouts and user permissions, and then create product items to track where your inventory is being stored.
• Add required products to work types, work orders, and work order line items to track the required parts for your service provider.
• Build line items for products which are to be consumed, so you can keep track of the use or consumption of your inventory items.
• When your stock gets low you’ll need to create a new product request and connect those with your associated orders, line items, locations and accounts.
• To fulfill a new product order, you’ll need to create a product transfer item to track the movement from one storage location to another.
• To track the transfer of goods between your warehouse and other storage locations, you’ll need to create shipments for storing the relevant transportation information.
• To easily track returned items you’ll need to create return orders within the system.

Disadvantages and limitations of using Salesforce for inventory and order management

A Salesforce inventory management hack is simply a band aid, a temporary solution to a larger more underlying problem which will further compound over time. As your business grows and becomes more complex in its inventory and order management requirements, you are going to need something more robust and purpose built to avoid issues happening or escalating in the future.

Large CRM solutions are very time consuming and expensive to setup, use and keep your data under control across your business. When you try to customize these monsters for other operational processes, such as inventory management, you might find they lack other key functionality like intelligent reporting capabilities which could cost your business more time and money to implement.

No one is denying that Salesforce is a sophisticated customer relationship management software but smart businesses are quickly realizing that there is no such thing as a one size fits all solution for their business. Instead they are looking to build an ecosystem of savvy cloud based systems which are smaller, more tailored and cost effective solutions for their growing business needs.

TradeGecko, the perfect inventory management solution

A smaller, purpose built inventory and order management solution like TradeGecko is not only cost effective but more customized to the needs of your products, orders and customers, all managed in the one place.

TradeGecko gives you detailed visibility and control over your inventory. Create purchase orders, backorders, stock takes and adjustments, plus easily track pack sizes, batches and expiry dates across multiple warehouses. It will also automatically manage your stock levels as you sell across all your online and offline sales channels including invoices, shipments and payments in multiple locations and currencies.

Our detailed customer insights help you build on your strongest relationships with customers, suppliers, and distributors by creating customized inventory and sales reports to track business performance and also plan for future growth.