Inventory Definition

1. The inventory is a complete and detailed list of the goods in the possession of a person or company at the time of collection.

2. Document containing a list of specifications of a material (products, goods) or immaterial (risks, skills) nature.

3. Law. Procedure used to verify which assets are part of a certain patrimony. Normally, it is used to legally define the rights over an inheritance, or the correct division according to a divorce process.

Etymology: by latin inventoryon the verb invenirewhich refers to ‘find’, ‘find’, for case formed by the prefix in-from ‘in’, and the verb I will come, from ‘to come’; followed by the suffix -iumaccording to the noun.

Grammatical category: masculine noun
in syllables: inventory.

Inventory

He inventory It’s that one Documentary record of assets and other objects belonging to a natural person, a company, a public agency, among others, and which is made with great precision and thoroughness in the recording of the data.

Although inventories are especially used at the request of companies or public agencies, which, as we pointed out, already have goods and other products that belong to their assets, that is, in the commercial and state areas, inventories can be used in various contexts and situations when you want to order and record the elements available in a place with a specific purpose.

For example, an individual who rents out a furnished apartment will carry out an inventory of each element, furniture, electrical appliances, and any other component present in the apartment at the time of renting it out so that they are reliably recorded and thus be able to keep a control of what was left and when the time comes for the end of the rental contract, check with this inventory that all the furniture and elements that were inventoried are present and in the corresponding conditions.

In places like libraries, it is also necessary to carry out an inventory, since it offers us a detailed record of everything that exists in that place that would be inventoried.

Allows you to find things more easily

It also makes it easier for us to be able to find each element more quickly and easily because its disposition appears in the inventory.

We must emphasize that inventories are carried out in places that have large amounts of belongings and elements, and this is so because they are a very efficient tool when it comes to organizing many things, comparing and knowing when they enter, when they leave, the costs that their income and expenses implied, among other issues.

In other words, the inventory provides us with order and organization, in addition to allowing us to know what is available in a given place.

Also and as a consequence of the situation just mentioned, inventory is called the checking and counting, both qualitative and quantitative, of the physical stocks with the theoretical ones that were duly documented.

In the field of business management, what the inventory does is register all of a company’s own and available assets for sale to its customers and that are therefore considered as current assets.

The goods that are plausible to be subject to inventory are intended for direct sale or those activities intended internally to the production process, as is the case of raw materials, unfinished products, spare parts for maintenance, materials packaging, company goods, finished goods, partially finished goods, goods in transit and packaging materials, among others.

Inventories classes

There are a large number of types of inventories, among the most recurring are: ending inventories (takes place every time the fiscal period closes, usually on December 31), periodic inventories (it is done every certain time), beginning inventories (all company assets are recorded), legal liquidation inventories, raw materials inventory, safety inventory, management inventory, physical inventoryamong others.

Among the reasons that exist in companies to carry out an inventory we can mention: to reduce acquisition costs, to reduce quality costs per start-up, to reduce costs linked to missing material and to reduce ordering costs.

Although, there are also many other reasons that make inventory a cumbersome, complex issue for the company in question, such as: storage costs, difficulties in responding to customers, the costs of coordinating its production, the costs of defective products at the dealing with large batches and the costs associated with reducing capacity.

The incorporation of technology has made this task of inventorying companies, or other spaces, much easier, since there is software specially developed for such purposes, such as databases, which greatly facilitate this task, which was previously more cumbersome since it had to be done in writing and in special books.

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