The Top 5 mistakes when tracking your Mary Kay® Inventory

We all know that it’s important to know what is on your shelf at any given time so you can have the products you need on hand for your customers and know what you need to order before you run out.

This can be a difficult process because something is always being added to the shelf (from your orders) and always being taken off your shelf (from sales, personal use, demos or loaning products to another consultant).

I have been helping with Mary Kay® inventory tracking/management for over 5 years now and I see the same issues pop up again and again so I thought I would point them out to you today in an effort to help you look out for them and (hopefully) avoiding making the same mistakes yourself =)

Here is the list… they are in order from most common mistakes made, but it may be a little different order for you because everyone’s business is a little different.

1. Personal use items: 

Mary Kay® is a great product, and 10 out of 10 Mary Kay® consultants use Mary Kay® Products =)  … unfortunately only about 6 out of 10 consultants remember to remove personal use products from their Mary Kay® Inventory control spreadsheet or word document AND they can get added back to the shelf when you are cleaning up.

Quick tip: Write a big “P” for personal use on the bottom of all your personal use products.

QT Office lets you create different kinds of invoices like “personal use, demos and exchanges” that deduct from your inventory without you doing it manually.

2.  Demo Products:

Demo products can be very confusing because they get taken off your shelf and set somewhere then somehow they find their way BACK on the shelf (just like personal use products).

A couple good ways to handle Demo products is to write a big “D” on the bottom of the product as soon as you take it off your shelf. Also, keeping your demo products in a separate location from your normal products can help as well.

3. Loaned and borrowed products: 

Ok, we have all been there…. you need a product now to give to a customer or you need to loan one to another consultant. Hey, it’s the Mary Kay® way! I completely support borrowing and loaning products BUT you have to track this… and not on an “IOU” sticky note… that’s asking for trouble. You can use free tools like Google docs (free online word software) or WordPad on your computer.

QT Office also has a complete loaned and borrowed product feature as well as an exchange feature so you always know where a product went and who still owes whom what.

4. Old packaging can cause a lot of issues:

Mary Kay® keeps up their package design for the times (not sure if you remember the pink to black packaging change… it was not too long ago…).

This is great for keeping up with current trends, but not so great for keeping up with inventory. What happens is that you may give someone an old product, then reduce the new product off your shelf (a lot of times they are the SAME product in different packaging… so that can be VERY confusing).

A good way to handle this is to zero out your old packaged product and add it to the new packaged amount (so you are combining the products). Just make sure there has not been a price change or that your old product is expired.

Note only does QT Office have all the product entered in for you but we also put a “D” next to all the discontinued items so you can tell them apart from each other. D means “discontinued”. This makes it easy to tell the packages apart from each other.

5. Selling Packages without opening them:

Most consultants and directors know that if you buy a Timewise® step 1 and 2 package together you save about 5 dollars (and who does not want to save money right?). Saving money is GREAT (I’m a big fan myself!). However, this does cause an issue when you open that package and sell one half of it.  =(

You would want to remove that product from your inventory first then add 1 to each of the individual products to keep your inventory correct.

There are lots of ways to get off track with your inventory, so hopefully pointing the most common ways out will help you look out for them!