Raising the Bar With Barcoding

MikeM
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For over 40 years, GSS has provided agricultural accounting software solutions for TRM (Trade Risk Management), CTRM (Commodity Trade Risk Management), Merchandising, Terminal Storage, Grain, Feed & Fertilizer blending, Peanuts, and Crop Inputs.  Our customizable solutions have enabled enterprise and growth oriented agribusinesses throughout North America to streamline their operations and lower their costs. 

Flexible & Context Sensitive Solutions

One of the most critical uses for barcoding is inventory management.  Placing a barcode on a product allows it to be quickly identified during shipment, receipts, or transfers between locations.  However barcoding can also be used in many other ways:

  • Merchandising Contracts:  When a barcode is printed on a merchandising contract, the document itself can become a customer identifier when it is presented at a location by the customer.  The contract can also be used as a quick way to specify pricing for a load. 
  • Commodity & Crop Inputs Invoices:  A printed barcode on an invoice can be used to pull up the transaction in the system.  This can be useful in both invoice reversals, and to see the information you may want to adjust if you are creating a customer credit memo.  A sales order with a barcode can be presented for product pickup, and speed the customer’s transactions. 
  • Commodity & Crop Inputs Purchases:  Similarly, printed barcodes on completed purchases can be used for reversals or adjustments, and barcodes on unshipped orders can be used during the delivery of product(s) to associate the delivery with the correct order in an easy and accurate manner.
  • Bills of Lading:  A bill of lading presented by a hauler can be used to bring up the order that is associated with the shipment, eliminating the need for time consuming explanations or re-keying of information. 

Throughout the GSS product line, barcoding is context sensitive.  If you scan a barcode for a merchandising contract when you are on the scale ticket entry screen, it will automatically add the customer information to the screen.  However if you scan the same contract number from the main menu, it will bring the merchandising contract up for editing.  

As these examples demonstrate, flexibility is an inherent aspect of our approach to ag accounting solutions development. Although these are some of the possible ways barcoding can be used, our team at GSS will work with you to create unique solutions that are customizable to your business. 

Barcode Scanner

Why Barcoding? 

Barcoding in Agrosoft and AgExeed offer numerous advantages over keying or manually tracking items, including:

  • Increased Accuracy:  By eliminating the manual keying of information, you make it less likely that an incorrect product, account number, scale ticket, or contract number will be entered. By eliminating the manual data entry of long numbers (which people are poor at) you leave more time for the operator to verify the accuracy of the transaction, and focus on customer satisfaction, which is a task real people excel at.  Barcoding enables your operators to spend less time doing, and more time thinking.  

    In AgExceed and Agrosoft, we use barcoding in our crop inputs module to enable rapid point-of-sale transactions of bagged products such as bagged seed, bagged animal feed, or bagged fertilizer. 
  • Lowering Costs:  By making transaction entry easier and faster, barcoding lowers your data entry costs.  In addition, it reduces the amount of time you spend correcting mistakes on the back end, because of the greater accuracy that is inherent in a bar coded solution.  And there is a minimum out of pocket cost, as the most basic barcode scanners, which act as a fast way to enter product numbers, can typically be purchased for anywhere from $30 to $100.

    To further reduce costs, GSS’s agribusiness accounting solutions enable bar coding not only on product receipt and product shipment, but also when doing inventory adjustments and reconciliations. More accurate data directly leads to better inventory management.  
  • Timeliness:  Making inventory, customer and contract identification more efficient enables operators to record transactions in a more timely manner.  An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution is only as good as the data that is entered into, and long lags between inventory movements and transaction entry can weaken internal controls and management’s ability to rely on system information for real-time decision making.  Accurate entry of merchandising contracts and inventory movements can affect inventory position and risk hedging decisions, and barcoding, combined with our real time updating of inventory, will ensure that decisions are made using timely and accurate information. 
  • Traceability: Barcoding improves bin management, and makes it easier to trace a product from receipt, through storage, transfers, and eventual shipment. It also allows you to accurately record lot numbers, and track where quarantined lot tracked products are, and their status. In addition to making sure that only tested products are released for consumption, barcoding can also be invaluable for product recalls. 
  • Sustainability:  Sustainable farming enables you to maximize your yields today without sacrificing the future.  Barcodes can include expiration dates that allow you to mark products for recycling, and can help you track the sourcing of products and ingredients. More timely information as the result of faster data entry will allow you better match supply and demand and eliminate waste.

Barcoding and Bulk Products

Barcoding is more readily associated with packaged products.  However, barcodes can be useful when dealing with bulk products and grain elevator solutions.  Specifically:

  • Scale Tickets:  Barcodes can be used for customer identification, as described above, to allow for rapid processing of loads.  A barcode on the bottom of a scale ticket can be used to identify a single load as it goes through the weighing and inspection process, recording gross, tare, and net, and associating quality tests with specific loads.
  • Bin Management:  Barcodes can be placed on storage bins, to record which bin was used for which loads.
  • Rail Cars:  Barcodes can be used to label rail cars, and enable the rapid weighing and loading/unloading of trucks, while maintaining shipment traceability.

Smart Terminals 

Our AgExceed product now offers enhanced barcode scanning through the use of portable, programmable, handheld terminals.  While traditional barcode scanners may largely limit you to identifying an account, contract, or product, smart terminals are handheld devices that allow you to view, enter, or complete transactions without having to be in front of a computer.  

As scanners grow more robust, this can be particularly valuable for remote field work, as you can use the scanner to adjust inventory balances or sell customers products on the spot at their location. 

Conclusion

With Agrosoft and AgExceed agribusiness accounting solutions, barcoding can be used in every step of the purchases, sales and accounting cycles, from the generation of the merchandising contracts, to the receipt of grain at the grain elevator, to sustainability initiatives, bin and inventory management and food traceability.  Barcodes can be used to identify products, customers, rail cars, and bins.  Bar codes can also identify individual transactions, such as orders, invoices, and receipts. With GSS, you can do it all