Ever wonder how a factory’s staff track their materials? The procedure is done with inventory control systems - a computerized method employed for tracking and managing products on a massive scale. A new advancement to inventory and stock control software is the use of cloud hosted software. Cloud inventory systems store the company’s records in an online data center, which allows the information to be accessed from web browsers and mobile device’s both inside and outside the company walls. The key advantage of using cloud based stock control software is that the inventory records remain consistent because they are stored in a central location. The cloud inventory control system can keep track of virtually any quantifiable resource. Since the inventory management system can record operations easily with the touch of a button, the steps in the process that usually take the most time are physically counting, measuring, or identifying the resources. When receiving a shipment or doing a stock take, warehouse staff need to count or measure materials efficiently. Nowadays, barcode scanners are widely used to expedite the process and to reduce the chance of human error. Armed with barcode scanners, a warehouse’s staff is able to record the items in a shipment received or in a warehouse section quickly, and then apply the counts to an inventory operation in the cloud inventory control system. Technicians or sales representatives in the field often need to record items received, delivered or transferred on a one-sy two-sy basis, where the issue isn’t so much the efficiency of counting as it is the certainty of recording part numbers correctly. Together the cloud stock management systems and barcode scanning technologies create extraordinarily efficient business processes. In addition to the efficiency advantages, cloud inventory control systems in particular offer a number of other advantages pertaining to IT. Since company staff can access the system from any web browser or mobile device, no software installation or maintenance is required. Since the database is hosted in a data center, no database administration is required on the side of the company. Since the software runs in a web browser, there is no requirement that employees have the same types of computers. On top of these advantages, cloud based systems for inventory management and warehouse management are usually priced inexpensively on a per month basis instead of requiring large up-front investment, making them affordable for growing companies. http://www.finaleinventory.com/wfi/cp/cloud-hosted-inventory-software