Are Internal Store Audit UK Beneficial?

If you are operating a store or even chain of stores, of course you are going to want to know what is on the shelves and what you have to sell your customs. You might think that this is a fairly easy task – you have invoices for what you have purchased, and this should match with what customers have purchased form you. But audits have evolved to become more than just a counting process and can be used for all manner of reasons. 

Retail audits

These are regarded as the simplest of audits and are, generally, an exotic stock check which may be balanced against what has left the shelves in a legitimate way. As a side interest, an audit of this nature can also highlight how much stock has also left in less legitimate way. Retail audits can be used to understand how much theft is going on in your store and can be a pointer towards how much digital surveillance you need to be running and – maybe more importantly – where you should concentrate such devices. 

Of course, not everything that simply disappears off your shelves and doesn’t appear on the cash registers is stolen, and internal store audits will also help you identify what products has been rendered unusable by accidental damage and product failure. Because you will still have these, or at least the remains of them, on site, they can be divided into areas that are to be scrapped (product damage) or returned to the supplier for action (product failure). An internal store audit will give you much greater control over you stock. 

Store surveys. 

These are fundamentally different in form and intent and may require the inclusion of outside contractors or specialists to run them. The reasons for this are that a store survey can have a huge scope, and will deal with areas that are incredibly specialized. You have two choices; select appropriate store staff and have them trained to the correct level or hire in people who have already had the training. 

If you train your own staff, then you have the luxury of retaining the audit and survey personnel on site all of the time, where you can engage then as much as you like. Of course, training time and the actual carrying out of surveys and audits will take those staff away from their day jobs, and that will cost you money. Giving staff training outside of their normal job roles may put them in line for pay rises as they have new skills, and will bolster their CV-potential, so you need to be careful. 

And then there is the question of ability and experience. If you hire in specialists, you are also engaging their years of experience in shop surveys, and that is something that you can’t train for. Retail Store Compliance Audits are not the same as audits and go far beyond checking stock. They are usually designed to determine the form of your store and whether you have the right stock in the right place. Imagine having a huge department store; if, for some strange reason, you decided to put chilled goods in with the make-up area, that would be undeniably wrong. While that may be a screamingly obvious example, the same principles apply on a more subtle level, and uncovering those discrepancies is the strength of the store survey operator. You will need both audits and store surveys to conduct your business properly, but the good manager will understand the difference between them.

If you need more details contact Inside Tracks.