In today’s competitive business climate, increasing cash flow is of prime importance to a retailer. Because you are in business to move merchandise out the door, and not just from receiving area to sales floor, you have to make sure you know which products are moving and which ones are not. With a wide product assortment including Candles of Eden and other quality products, you can sometimes lose sight of what is really selling and what is really sitting. When you age your inventory, you can see which products produce cash flow and which do not.

A general rule that applies to retailing is that you should consider any product that is on your shelves for three months or less as “current”. Next, any products sitting on your shelves or displays for four to six months are products you should consider in the “stale” stage. In addition, any products that rest on your shelves for more than six months are products you should consider “old”.

Now, it doesn’t mean any of these products are poor products with no appeal. It may be a case of over-ordering and hence overstocking is causing products to sit and collect dust. You will know soon enough if a product is not appealing to consumers when you find you never place a re-fill order for it and have no sales data for it. However, you may carry far too much inventory of a top-quality selling product line such as SoyLuscious® Soy Candles. It’s a popular product, but if you go to the extreme and over order this can cause some to back up in your stockrooms and at the back of shelves and displays. You remedy this situation by ordering enough requirements but not too much.

It’s tempting to order massive back-ups of popular selling lines. You do not have to do this if you deal with reputable suppliers who provide you timely deliveries of their products on a consistent basis. When you deal with quality suppliers like Candles of Eden and others you know you have a source for inventory that you can tap into when you need them. This way you order enough of what you need when it comes to SoyLuscious® Soy Candles and other products, knowing you can always reorder as suits your needs and your budget. This prevents you from tying up too much capital in stock that you really won’t need until six-months or more down the road.

Some of today’s sophisticated computer software programs can age your inventory for you. As you input your deliveries of stock into the system, the program will keep track of how long product lines have been in your establishment. If you are a smaller operation with fewer lines and want to know how old your inventory is as you “walk around” your store you can code your price stickers accordingly. In the food industry where I spent many years we would tag a canned food product as such: 2A38apr, which would be a code above the price. This was for manager and staff reference when it came to physically looking at the age of stock sitting on shelves. This code meant the product arrived in the store in the third week of January of 2008. “A” is January, “3″ is the third week of that month, “2″ at the beginning and “8″ at the end are 2008. The small “apr” at the end is the actual month you want to see the product sell by in that year, which in this case is April. The reason for the code not blatantly spelling out January 21, 2008 is so customers would not feel that a product was stale if the date was not the current week’s date. This is a simple method, which allows you to spot check the age of items quickly as you walk around your store.

When you keep track of how long items are in your place of business, you control your inventory instead of letting it control you. You can look at a product and make decisions to spur its sales. You may decide to take a markdown and move it out. You may decide to come up with some kind of nouveau promotion to create interest to sell more of the product to get that cash flow you need. Whatever you decide to do, you are being proactive, and aging of your inventory caused you to be this way. Without a computer or manual aging system in place, you may not make those decisions to get product moving out your doors. That’s because you may not always recognize which items or lines are not selling.

Take the steps necessary to age your Candles of Eden and other inventory. Your goal is to have the majority of your products in the “current” category. You will have the capacity to get in fresh new lines when you have the capital to buy. Not having all your money tied up in old and even underperforming stock, lets you buy the quality lines such as SoyLuscious® Soy Candles that will deliver you the cash flow you desire. Age your inventory and you will protect your business. You will stock products that really sell. You will stock the right amounts of them each month, and along with that improve the net worth of your business.