Barcode Tracking Photo

Implementing a bar coding system into your retail business can have a huge positive effect on your bottom line. You can speed up checkout times, inventory count and significantly improve the accuracy of your inventory tracking.

Your retail customers will love the shorter checkout lines with the faster product scanning at the till. Your employees will love the fact that by scanning inventory with a scanner they don’t have to try to memorize product codes and prices, which will not only increase employee morale and retention, but will also virtually eliminate all data entry errors.

Inventory count will also be easier and more accurate since employees can use portable inventory scanners to do inventory count, instead of trying to match up products with some kind of manual printout sheet.

More accurate inventory control can help your business compete in today’s economy by being able to keep inventory moving. With a good quality point of sale system with reporting functionality, you’ll be able to see which items are selling and which items are not currently selling. This way you can make sure to keep high turnover items in stock, while minimizing the amount of inventory you have which doesn’t sell.

Another benefit to more accurate inventory is that your theft and shrinkage percentages will go down because inventory will be much more easily tracked and more frequent inventory counts can be done by using inventory scanners to speed up the process.

There are just a few of the many benefits to using a bar coding system in your retail business.

So what is needed to implement such a system? There are three main components:

(1) A Label Printer – The first thing you’ll need is a bar code label printer. The best and most efficient printers on the market are direct thermal label printers. They can print label stickers individually for each item quickly, efficiently and very economically. Using a printer like this is much more cost-effective than using a laser printer since you can print individual labels on a direct thermal printer and there is no need for toners.

(2) A Scanner – The second thing you’ll need is a bar code scanner. Scanners come in many different styles, sizes and types. The simplest way to go is to go with a hand-held scanner with a scanning stand. This way the scanner can scan the code simply by placing the product code underneath the scanner, but does also offer the clerk the flexibility of picking up the scanner from the scanning stand and scanning the item directly if needed. This is great for larger items that customers want to leave in the cart, or when it is difficult to position the product code underneath the scanning stand.

(3) A Bar Code Enabled Point of Sale Program – The final thing you’ll need is a point of sale program that supports both bar code printing and scanning. Not all point of sale software packages support this functionality so you’ll need to find a quality point of sale program provider with software which supports printing and scanning natively within the program.

If your point of sale software doesn’t support barcoding, trying to find workaround printing labels separately in some other software will be a massive waste of time. It is much better to start with the right point of sale software package with support built right in. Those are the three main components of a bar coding system. Your best bet is to start with a point of sale software package that supports printing and scanning of codes and then choosing a label printer and scanner that is compatible with that software.

One of the most popular bar code printers on the market is the Zebra LS 2844 bar code printer and one of the most popular bar code scanners on the market is the Symbol LS2208 bar code scanner.

By Nelson J. Packard

Article Source: ezinearticles.com