#BARCODE INVENTORY FOR SMALL BUSINESS SOFTWARE#

If you need additional inventory and order management capabilities, you may want to consider a more robust barcode inventory system for your small business.Ī good barcode inventory system should offer you the ability to:Įach of these five bullet points deserves to be discussed in greater detail to show how much goes into it.

#BARCODE INVENTORY FOR SMALL BUSINESS SOFTWARE#

Some small businesses use barcode software that just lets them create and print barcode labels, but it does not have advanced inventory management capabilities. The possibilities of 2D barcodes have, frankly, not been tested to their fullest potential at this point in time. They can be used to allow customers to quickly visit a website and to allow carriers to scan parcels and see where they are going and where they came from. These barcodes can be even smaller than 1D barcodes and still offer much more information. A barcode scanner that can read a 2D barcode obtains the necessary inventory information from this type of barcode simply by scanning it. Instead of only offering a sequence of numbers that can be read by a barcode scanner in order to go out and find the information locked away in a barcode inventory system, 2D barcodes are often square shaped and they include a lot of pixelated dots and geometric shapes that actually contain the codified data. This is because they are not simple binaries of vertical lines. Two-dimensional barcodes are much more in depth than 1D barcodes. There are many types of barcodes that fall under the category of 1D barcodes. These barcodes are quite useful to companies looking to keep track of their inventory items, mail, and more. The spaces between them allow a barcode scanner to identify a specific product number of other identifying marker to allow it to search through a digital inventory system and find the product that corresponds to that number contained in the 1D barcode. These are made of a bunch of vertical black lines that are stretched out horizontally.

One-dimensional barcodes are what people typically picture when they think of generic barcodes. It is much bigger than what you might think because it looks like a simple one-digit difference. The difference between 2D barcodes and 1D barcodes is quite big. Some barcode scanners read barcodes from a longer distance and some can read 2D barcodes in addition to just 1D barcodes. Also, some hardware and software combinations work better together than others, so you will want to make sure that your hardware and software are fully compatible with each other so there is no miscommunication between them. If you want to print your own barcodes so you can create custom labels to put on every part and product in your warehouse, you will need a barcode printer. Having the right barcode scanners can make a big difference.

An important part of any barcode inventory system is the hardware.

Barcode inventory for small business