Managing a retail operation is a complicated business because it involves different activities such as supervision of merchandise and finances, employees and business premises; inventory management, monitoring and analysing customer needs, and more. Carrying out all these duties manually, could be extremely difficult and error prone because relying on paper forms and manual data capture could lead to human errors, data loss, and even budgeting errors.
Digitizing your forms and documents, you can eliminate the risks of data loss, simplify inventory documentation, optimize supply chain management and simplify inventory documentation.
Here are a few reasons why mobile retail forms and digital data capture can improve your retail management.
- Data accuracy
Mobile retail forms facilitate data capture because they are simply to use and can replace manual data collection. When building your mobile retail form, take into consideration that you can add dynamic features to guide user’s input to make the whole process faster and more effective. Mobile forms allow retail managers to obtain accurate data all the time. These forms can also be enhanced with automatic calculations, skip logic, dynamic hidden fields, and more.
- Increased transparency
Mobile retail forms smoothly and effectively improve transparency across different business departments and branches. Leveraging new data types such as images, GPS/maps, and sketches, enables retail teams to add visual information to form data. For example, if a shipment of damaged goods arrives ton the company, a photo of the merchandise could be used to inform the sender about the issue and to place a complain. Mobile apps allow any member of the team to add graphic material that could be very helpful to highlight areas of concern or to complain about errors.
- Fast response
Thanks to mobile retail forms, data is immediately available to supervisors and team members, therefore, retail management teams can obtain and analyse relevant insights in real-time which allow retail managers to take quick and well informed decisions and to be well prepare for any unforeseen circumstances.
- Simplified inventory and inspections
Mobile retail forms can be further improved when integrated with other tools such as barcode scanning that could be very helpful to collect data or to fill out mobile forms in the field. Barcodes can simplify record inventory transactions. Digital signature is other feature that can added to mobile forms to ease duties such as inventories and store inspections so these can be completed rapidly and precisely and just using one device.
There are apps for all sorts of retail reports and retail forms, including the following: delivery receipts, workers’ compensation paperwork, retail inventory control self-assessments, work order checklists, customer satisfaction surveys, business plan forms, instalment contracts, mystery shopper reports, retail evaluation reports and more. Once completed, mobile retail forms can be instantly sent to teammates, customers, and partners.
- Data integration
Mobile forms can also be integrated with your other business apps and databases so the collected information could be instantly available and synced to other business systems. Integrating your digital retail forms optimizes and accelerate your processes, eliminates the need for physical storage and have a positive impact on your business performance.
DataScope apps give can help you to collect and share information such as order forms, inventory reports and merchandise inspection reports. To learn more about how our mobile forms can improve your retail management and data capture, sign up for a free account, or contact us.
DataScope is a platform which allows various industries to streamline, organize and evaluate the work of their field staffs thanks to online forms which provide real time indicators 100% adaptable to any field.
