Online inventory management is complex and prone to errors as your business tends to grow. Whether you are running a small-scale manufacturing unit or a large production plant, you certainly need inventory management software to manage your day-to-day supply chain operations. The most accessible inventory management software provides data reporting in real-time and flexible integrations with your current system. An apt inventory management software for your business can offer several capabilities that can help increase your profit by decreasing the overall costs of SCM operations.
If you’re still stuck with managing inventory on Excel, then it’s high time to switch and get ahead of the competition. If budget constraint is your major concern, then fortunately, there are many free and open-source inventory management software available to meet your individual business requirements. . Here, we give you the top six free inventory management software that you and your business can benefit from.
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6 Best Free and Open Source Inventory Management software
1. Odoo
Odoo is primarily an open-source business management software that bundles a wide range of ERP and CRM tools including inventory management. The community version of the software can be downloaded for free and deployed on your own server. It comes with loads of extensive features like advanced routing, productivity, replenishments, inventory valuation, reporting, and integration. It uses the double inventory management system that mitigates the chances of fault in the delivery and management of inventory. It also allows smartphone integration so that the user can easily monitor the inventory anywhere and anytime. Its latest 14.0 version upgrade was released in October 2020.
The paid version of Odoo, also known as the Enterprise version, is Saas-based and doesn’t need you to buy a server space separately. Common security vulnerabilities are eliminated due to its high-security system automatically. Users can choose the package and features based on their requirements. Odoo has also been featured on our list of the best ERP software.
2. PartKeeper
PartKeeper is yet another tremendous open-source, free inventory management software that you can download from the official website without paying a dime. It is flexible to use with valuable options like searching for the items in the inventory based on manufacturer or distributor keyword search. It is designed for companies handling electronic components.
The users can easily keep track of the stock because the online server can monitor every operation at every business organization. It also allows the import and export of data from Excel and CSV spreadsheets, saving a lot of time over the traditional way of updating the data manually.
PartKeeper is one of the best choices for SME companies. Like any other open-source software, the user would have to buy hosting services to deploy the server, which the PartKeeper team can offer support at a minimal cost.
3. Zoho Inventory
It is a free inventory management software designed to support small and upcoming businesses by helping them handle their inventory effortlessly across multiple sales channels and devices. Zoho provides many enterprise solutions and is mainly famous for the Zoho CRM and Project Management software.
Zoho Inventory is an efficient internet-based free inventory management tool that provides users with many useful features and benefits. It has a centralized view dashboard that provides access to your sales orders, package information, invoices, purchase orders, reports, and many more. It is also suitable for large organizations because the users can automate their inventory management while tracking the orders on the go and making more intelligent business decisions. The users can also integrate the inventory management software with other Zoho applications.
It is one of the most flexible and reliable inventory management software which also comes with a mobile tracking feature that supports any Android or iOS device. Zoho also has a paid version which comes with the following additional features –
a. Stock adjustment and product shrinking features
b. Application management
c. Software management and inventory
d. Inventory replenishment for avoiding stock-out conditions
e. Delivery tracking and order fulfillment
The paid users can enjoy all these features at a minimal subscription cost of around $29 per month.
4. Square for Retail
Square for Retail is cloud-based retail management software and POS system that supports various businesses to handle their retail operations online and offline. The main features consist of inventory management, checkout and payment management, order management, website builder, and reporting.
The inventory management features that are available for use in its free plan include counting, stock tracking, low stock alerts. These notifications allow you to commence inventory replenishment at the right time before the stock outages affect normal operations.
Additionally, you can handle cart management, payment management, barcode scanning, and customer management. The customer support feature comprises phone, email, social media, live chat, and a self-service knowledge base. You can upgrade to its paid version to gain access to many other features if required.
5. Erply
Erply is quite a popular automated hybrid POS (Point of Sales) system that allows the user to update the POS either online or offline, while the data is automatically synchronized once the software gets online. It offers useful features like stock level tracking, reordering stocks, inventory management, customer CRM, promotional campaign management, coupons, and many more.
Erply also comes with the shipping integration feature, so that you can easily ship products to the clients with the help of any courier service like UPS or FedEx. Excluding this, the paid version comes with the following additional features –
a. Time clock and payroll report program
b. Integrated payments system
c. Electronic signature storage
d. Purchasing report
e. Suspend sale and mobile selling
6. MarketMan
MarketMan is a cloud-based free inventory management software that is designed especially for the restaurant business It simplifies the order management process, cuts down waste, and kicks-start profitability.
You can use it on your smartphones, tablet, or computer without any additional hardware and installation costs. Set up is simple, and no installation is required. Additionally, it provides anytime, anywhere access to your restaurant information. It is also beneficial for the supervision of the workers and employees of the company that can help you to assign the right task to the right worker at any moment of time. Other features include –
a. Inventory management and purchase management for restaurants
b. 3rd Party software integration capabilities
c. Permission and user management
d. Supplier and budget management
If you haven’t started using inventory management software for your business yet, you might be spending more than what you should be. With so many free and open-source options available, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t try one now.
In case you are looking for any other inventory management software, check out SaaSworthy.
