As the new year begins, it’s always a good time to make better habits. New Year’s resolutions aren’t just fun traditions to pass the time—they’re motivation. They help us improve ourselves each and every year.
And while many people resolve to head to the gym, eat more greens, begin new hobbies, or learn a foreign language, you don’t have to stick to the same, tired old goals.
You can use New Year’s resolutions as an opportunity to grow your business and improve your customer experience. With the help of the Cheers POS liquor inventory software, it’s easier than ever to keep track of your store’s nitty-gritty details.
Many people forget to make their inventory tracking a priority, especially around the new year. And this is understandable! The holidays are an incredibly busy time for businesses all over the country, but it’s especially true for liquor store owners! So no one can blame you for wanting to minimize your workload.
That being said, it’s best to get inventory management out of the way while you can. When you’re running a business, there’s always something to be done, and it’s easy to forget about your priorities.
Before you know it, you can lose track of your time, and soon enough, you may be buried in the work you put off for another day. So utilize our inventory software and get a handle on it now!
Cheers POS
Before we give you our tips for inventory management in the new year, we want to tell you a little more about ourselves. Cheers POS is a liquor store POS system founded by liquor store owners. Our founders have been behind the counter themselves, and they’ve seen firsthand how complicated running a small business can be.
As a result, they knew what problems liquor store owners face, and they got to work devising a convenient solution. That solution comes in the form of Cheers POS. Cheers POS aims to be an easy-to-understand software to expedite the liquor store management process.
Our Mission
Above all, Cheers POS prioritizes the customer. We say this because, in a sense, we were the customer. We’ve been in your shoes! As we developed our software, we continued to ask ourselves one important question: “What does the customer want?”
This question was always at the forefront of our mind, because we were designing this software for liquor store owners and liquor store owners alone. This is why we’ve also put so much work into our customer training and support videos.
We’ve seen how some companies abandon the customer as soon as the sale is complete. We didn’t want to make the same mistake. So when you partner with us, we will work with you whenever you need assistance.
Keeping Things Simple
If at any point a design choice made things inconvenient or confusing, we went in the opposite direction. The point of this software was to make life for small business owners easier, not harder.
Whenever we add a feature to our software, we want to ensure it will be beneficial to most or all liquor store owners. If you need it, we want Cheers POS to have it. This is why we made liquor inventory software a priority.
The Value of Accurate Inventory
As the new year begins and you get to work understanding our liquor inventory software, you may not see precisely why managing your inventory should be such a priority. Of course, it’s convenient to have an idea of how much product you have in stock, but is this really something you should get done as soon as possible?
Absolutely! Effective inventory management is about more than just keeping track of your stock. It’s also vital for your taxes at the end of the year. If you maintain a consistent record of inventory over the course of the whole year, you can better understand how much you sold and how much you didn’t.
If everything goes well, you’re going to sell a lot of products throughout the year. Countless bottles of wine, tequila, whiskey, vodka, gin, rum, and liqueur. Not to mention 6-packs, 12-packs, shooters, boxes of wine, and whatever other miscellaneous products you have sitting on your shelf.
Americans love their alcohol. In fact, every year in the United States, citizens purchase 4.3 billion bottles of wine alone. There are a lot of alcohol buyers in the US!
As a result, keeping track of all of your stock can be a major headache, especially if you’re doing it the old-fashioned way. With the Cheers POS liquor store management system, you can take some of the hard work out of the equation. But what do you do when things aren’t selling?
When to Cut Your Losses
It’s always difficult to give up on a product, especially when it’s a product you were excited about. You thought that banana-flavored liqueur would be the next big trend—a perfect supplement for all kinds of mixed drinks. But now that very same liqueur is taking up valuable shelf space, and the large advertisement in the window is covering up better-selling products.
As painful as it is to admit, maybe it’s time to get rid of this product. There’s no shame in that! Not every decision you make as a business owner will be the right one. It’s important not to fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy. If you invested lots of time and money into a project, you may want to stick with it, even after the liquor inventory software proves the product is a failure.
Don’t be afraid to cut your losses before you lose even more! But what do you do with a product that’s no good?
What to Cut
It’s always helpful to have an idea of which products will spoil and which ones won’t. This can help you decide which strategies you need to employ to get rid of products that aren’t selling very well.
Liquor
Unopened bottles of liquor are usually “shelf stable,” which means you don’t have to worry about sealed liquor spoiling. So if you have the space to spare, you don’t have to rush into tossing it.
For example, you can save any bottles of poorly-selling liquor and package them in opaque packaging, like wrapping paper. You can then sell the liquor as a “mystery bottle.” Market this as a fun date-night accessory. Customers looking for a little adventure can buy a random bottle of liquor and give it a try. This way, you can sell products that your customers aren’t picking out themselves.
You can also include these bottles in a package set. If you have a bottle of gin that isn’t selling, you can package it with some mixing utensils and a jar of olives and market it as a “make your own martini” kit. This makes the bottle seem like a feature, rather than a product in and of itself.
Beer & Wine
Unfortunately, unlike bottled liquor, beer and wine can spoil. Beer should generally be consumed after 3 months to a year, depending on whether or not it’s pasteurized. How quickly you should consume wine depends on the quality of said wine. Expensive wine can be aged in barrels for years at a time. But you may want to consume cheap wine within a couple years.
Like with liquor, mystery bags are always a great way to sell old products. If the beer or wine is local, then you can market it as such, doing a special to highlight local breweries and wineries. People enjoy supporting their neighbors!
Organization
As you set up your liquor inventory software, you might realize that your store is more cluttered than you originally thought. One of the common issues people face when doing their inventory is a lack of organization. Too often, we overestimate our own ability to keep track of things.
We write down a password and place the piece of paper in an arbitrary location, assuring ourselves that we’ll be able to find it when the time comes. But of course, when the time actually comes, that piece of paper is never where we remember putting it!
The same problem arises when we do inventory. You place a few whiskey bottles beside each other on the shelf without actually designating that part of your store with a specific label. Soon, every section begins to blend together. Your customers can’t figure out where one section ends and another begins!
Start Small
You might take a look at your inventory and panic a bit. You may begin to fear that it’s too late—you’ve let your store get cluttered, and now you’ll never be able to fix it. But take a deep breath. It’s never too late to get things back in order, and don’t feel compelled to fix everything at once. Start with something simple.
For example, you could go through your store and compartmentalize everything by size. 50ml bottles go on one shelf, 100ml bottles go on another, and so on. Once everything is in its place, you can begin separating them by type. Whiskey goes here, tequila goes there. Before you know it, everything will be where it needs to be!
Take It One Day at a Time
If your New Year’s resolution is to organize your inventory, you’ll probably want to get it all out of the way quickly.
You’ll mark off a Saturday on your calendar and spend all day getting everything sorted. But what if you don’t get it all done? You risk running into a wall and giving up. You’ll feel hopeless, like this task is too time-consuming to ever complete. But take your time!
The Cheers POS system allows you to constantly update your inventory, so you don’t have to worry about getting it done in one massive chunk at the beginning of the year. Update it gradually, so it becomes a part of your weekly schedule and not an annual grind.
Learn More About Liquor Store Management
Excited about the idea of upgrading your liquor inventory software? Maybe you want to hear more liquor store management tips! We have resources available to help. These blogs have been curated and reviewed by us, so you know you’re getting the best advice every time.
And if you’d like to try Cheers POS for yourself, let us know, and you can get a quote soon! We think you’ll be glad you did.