St. Clair County
It is the last Friday of the quarter in St. Clair County and your accountant wants a number for what is sitting on your shelves. You walk the back room with a clipboard and find two boxes of something you ordered last week, a case nobody has touched since spring, and an empty bin where your most used item should be.
With an inventory system in place, every item has a home, a count, a minimum and a reorder point. Stock comes in against a purchase order and goes out against a order, and the numbers in your software match the shelf because someone checks a few bins every week instead of the whole room once a year.
Now the quarter-end number takes minutes. You stop paying for the same thing twice, you stop running out halfway through a order, and the cash that used to gather dust in the back room stays in the bank.