A Nonprofit Finance Director lacks an inventory system to track food donations by type or quantity, relying only on weight. This hinders purchase planning. They need a system to scan and categorize items, but budget constraints may delay implementation until next year.
Director of Finance
The lack of specific inventory systems for a food cupboard. Our donations are all different skus and nothing we’ve seen can handle it. Now we only inventory by weight
Roger Lynch
Priority level
High
Willing to pay for solution
This is the biggest problem. We’re a nonprofit and without a grant to specifically pay for this we would not be able to purchase the software until next year’s budget cycle
Value Reasoning
It makes future planning difficult. If we had better visibility into exactly what food we provided same month, last year we could be proactive rather than reactive
Current process
Food is weighed in and weighed out. Using Feeding America guidelines we can assign a value. We can not assign a quantity of type.
Flaw in current process
There is no out of the box solution for us to track specific inventory
Impact
We can not tell, quantitatively, what we should be purchasing for the next six months because we only see current weights. We can make educated guesses but without a history of our inventory it’s just that.
Attempts at solving
No inventory system can handle different goods and single skus
Ideal solution
Ideally if we could scan food in and it was categorized for us both in and out Ie if we have 100 cans of green beans donated all with different brands. Each would scan in and out as “Green Beans 12oz”
Value reasoning
It makes future planning difficult. If we had better visibility into exactly what food we provided same month, last year we could be proactive rather than reactive
Challenge: Food cupboards often deal with a wide variety of SKUs, making it difficult to create a standardized inventory system that can accurately track and categorize diverse donations.
Challenge: Nonprofits typically operate with limited budgets and staff, which can hinder the development and implementation of sophisticated inventory systems.
Challenge: Existing processes may be deeply ingrained, leading to resistance from staff and volunteers when introducing new inventory systems.
Challenge: Integrating a new inventory system with existing software or databases can be technically challenging and time-consuming.
