Inventory is the single largest capital investment made by most manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers. Given today's global financial crisis, the importance of managing inventory could not be more crucial. In order to thrive in today's tough competitive environment, best-in-class companies need to not only manage inventory but to optimize it.

Two of the most important decisions businesses make are how much inventory to order and how much to keep on hand. Unfortunately, most of today's inventory optimization software packages rely on cost based settings that are only partially capable of measuring true business performance. Poor inventory management and inexperience are among the top reasons for small business failure.

The current method to set or calculate reorder points in QuickBooks is manual. The most common technique consists the following steps:

1) Generate an "Inventory Status Report By Item" show below:

2) Export the report to MicroSoft Excel

3) Multiply the "sales/week" column by 4

4) Import back into QuickBooks

5) Map this calculated sales/week column to "reorder pt" column.

Besides being complicated, this is far from optimum inventory levels. This does not factor in your lead time, your variability in business, etc... and puts you at risk of having too much or having too little. There is a better and easier way.

There are also many QuickBooks compatible products on the market that focus on the administrative tasks of managing inventory, however, only one optimizes inventory, Phitch. Phitch is the only software of its kind - it determines inventory alerts, reorder points, safety stocks, and order quantities at your point of maximum economic profit in order to optmize your company's investment in inventory. All other products on the market today rely on manual settings. In three clicks of the mouse, Phitch optimizes each reorder point and build point at peak financial performance.

In order to maximize your wealth, Phitch determines your actual demand and lead-time as well as your variability in demand and lead-time using data from QuickBooks while all other programs do not even consider these important factors.

Phitch was designed to demonstrate its value proposition. Only Phitch provides a report that measures the benefit obtained to validate the cost of acquisition as well as highlighting opportunities to the grow business by seizing demand variability options while driving out supply variability. It is remarkable how much small businesses have needlessly tied up in cost in cash.