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Barcoding 101: How You Can Benefit From a Barcode System

Posted by Matthew KostaneckiLast Updated December 13th, 2022
— 7 minutes reading

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a business with stocked products that wouldn’t benefit from barcoding. Yet there are still quite a surprising number of businesses that aren’t benefiting from the convenience and accuracy afforded by barcodes, simply because they still operate on pen and paper or Microsoft Excel templates.

The most common objection is that a barcode system might be too expensive or difficult to implement.

Well here’s something a lot of people don’t know: not only is it actually inexpensive to set up a barcode system, it can be quite easy to implement, too! Depending on your needs, a few hundred dollars could set you up with a complete system.

Why would you care about barcoding? Well, in a nutshell, it allows you to run your small business more accurately and efficiently, getting you ready for growth. You’ll look more professional too! Especially if you run a store and scan items at your checkout.

If you’d like a quick overview of some of the most widely used barcoding acronyms then you can checkout our barcoding glossary. Or if you’re interested in a more in-depth look at how you can get started barcoding your small business be sure to checkout our Ultimate Barcoding Guide. It covers absolutely everything barcode related.

Barcoding will increase your inventory accuracy

Setting up a barcode system can dramatically increase your inventory accuracy. Having barcodes on your items makes them instantly readable to a computer paired with a scanner. It lets your computer do all the heavy lifting for you!

While computers aren’t perfect, they are significantly more accurate than any human ever could be. There are studies showing that even the best trained data-entry person will make at least one mistake every 250 keystrokes.

But don’t just take our word for it — take our video, too! We’ve made a great three-minute video about how a barcode system can help your business:

How To Set Up A Barcode System | inFlow Inventory software
 

Save time and increase your efficiency

Using barcodes allows you to process your inventory much faster than any other manual method. Think of the length of most universal product codes (UPCs), which are 12 characters or more. You could type those numbers into your system, or you could activate a scanner with one press of your finger and have the computer do the typing for you.

All of those saved keystrokes add up to a surprising amount of extra time for you to do other things for your business!

Grow your business easily

Sure, you might have just a few products now, but what happens when your inventory starts growing? By integrating a barcode system sooner rather than later, you’re building scalability into your business.

Scalability means the barcode system will work the same, regardless of whether you have one item, 100 items, or 10,000 items. A barcode system will help your company avoid growing pains as you add more products.

Having a system in place also makes training new members of your team much easier. Instead of memorizing products and product descriptions to look up items, your new team member can easily scan the product in and have the computer bring up the relevant product details.

Look professional

A good barcode system has a two-fold advantage: it increases your own inventory accuracy, and it also dramatically decreases the time a customer spends at checkout. A customer will have a better first impression if you can quickly and easily process their purchase using a scanner system, as opposed to waiting while you manually type codes into a system at checkout.

How do I set up a complete barcoding system?

You can set up a complete barcoding system with just three items:

The initial setup cost for a complete system would start as low as $89/month for the software $79.99 for a USB scanner and $133 for a Dymo barcode printer

If you’d like a complete overview of setting everything up, you can download our free ebook entitled “Barcode Your Small Business”. The book will walk you through the entire process in detail. For now, you can continue on to get an overview:

Generate your barcodes

In its simplest form, a barcode is just a picture that represents numbers, text, or both. This picture can be read by a scanning device and the information is almost instantly transmitted to a computer.

You have two main options when it comes to setting up your small business items with barcodes. You can either make your own barcodes using a barcode font (or web service like the one from ID Automation) or buy existing barcodes from a universal database such as UPCs.

If you’re going to just be using the barcode system internally, then you can pretty much use any barcode type. The most common is named Code 3 of 9. You can generate Code 3 of 9 barcodes by using an online barcode generator or even by using a barcode font. You can print these on standard label stickers, stick them on your product and you’re all set!

If you’re a manufacturer and you want your products to be sold on Amazon or any big retailers, then you’ll want to get UPCs. It’s best to buy UPCs directly from the source, GS1 US, which now offers single UPCs for $30 with no renewal fee. Curious why GS1 barcodes are important? We recently interviewed GS1 US to learn why small businesses should consider using official GS1 barcodes.

Get yourself a barcode scanner

inFlow Smart Scanner in action.

The next step is to get a barcode scanner. You’d typically want one that connects over USB for simplicity’s sake. You’ll find them in wired and wireless options ranging from $50–100. To learn more about scanners in general, click here.

We also make a USB barcode scanner that you can purchase on www.inflowshop.com. Our scanners come with a two year guarantee and are available in seven unique colours.

Get software to make sense of it all

One of the most common misconceptions when trying to implement a barcode system is that people think a simple barcode contains all the product’s data.

For example, some people think that when you scan a barcode, all the relevant data should instantly appear on screen. Unfortunately, this is not the case unless you’re using super specialized barcodes and scanners that are outside the small business realm.

If your products already have barcodes on them then you’re already well on your way to setting up a complete barcoding system. But even with a scanner you’ll need to setup a database with all your product information and connect those products with their respective barcodes. Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to bring up any and all product information that you’ve programmed into your database by simply scanning the barcode.

A barcode typically represents an alphanumeric code and the software on your computer is what links that code to a product record. For this to work, all your product details have to be saved somewhere on your computer in advance. This is true for most major retailers even when using universal product codes (UPCs), the product information has to be pre-loaded into a database.

Of course you can still scan a barcode into a computer without software, but it will just type out a jumble of numbers and letters. However, scanning a barcode into inventory management software like inFlow Cloud will bring up that specific product record while you’re making a sale or looking up a product.

inFlow makes barcoding easy by tying barcodes straight to your products

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