Inventory management and control is an integral part of a business- either a manufacturing firm or a service-firm. Efficient inventory management is absolutely essential, not only to keep the firm running smoothly, but also to represent professionalism and profitability to potential customers and investors.

Inventory stock control is a part of inventory management that relates to maintaining stock levels effectively. Inventory stock control software is a tool that helps in inventory tracking and controlling stock levels, real-time as well as batch. It proficiently deals with order entry, point-of-sale (POS) invoicing, quotation generation, invoice generation, preparing purchase orders, dealing with recurring invoicing, and handling multi-job service orders. The software has intelligent interfaces that can determine when stock needs to be reordered, giving the user complete control over the inventory cycle. This helps keep the inventory always stocked up so that the user does not lose an order due to insufficient stock. The software can also identify and remove dying stock. It can track sales trends over a period of time and report on expected orders. Other useful features include barcode generation, customer and supplier database management, email support, multi-user interface, reorder management, group inventory, and generation of custom reports.

Integrated Inventory Management Software from NetSuite, XpertMart from Dinari Systems, Inventory Strategy Manager from Entalysis, iMagic Inventory Software from iMagic, Inventory4000 from Real Asset Management and STOCK.NET from Xpress Data Systems are some of the products available. Inventory stock control software can be bought for $199. There are many advanced versions also available, for a higher price. Most providers also offer free demo versions for a limited period. The minimum system requirements for installing this software are: an Intel Pentium processor, Microsoft Windows 95 OSR 2.0/ Windows 98 SE/ Windows Millennium Edition/ Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 5/ Windows 2000/ or Windows XP, 32 MB RAM and a 24MB space in the hard disk.