What is an SKU? All about Stock Keeping Units

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If you own or manage a warehouse or at least deal with any inventory, you must know what a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) is. Any business that has inventory, whether retail or wholesale, needs to know how to use SKUs. But if you are just starting out or just want to learn more, you've come to the right place. Here at Atramic, we aim to educate online entrepreneurs. So, in this article, we're going to focus on what an SKU is. And how is it being applied to business?
What is an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)?
Every retailer and warehouse manager needs to know their inventory. Monitoring the movement and logistics of every single item or batch is important. But how do you track and manage dozens, hundreds or thousands of items? That's where SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) come in.

A SKU is a form of identification assigned to individual items in storage. Let's take an example. Say you sell three soft drinks - Coca-Cola, Fanta and Sprite. You sell them in two volumes - small cans and large bahamas telegram database bottles. In this case, you would need a total of six stock keeping units - one for each brand and one for each size of the drink.
A SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is an alphanumeric code assigned to each product. The letters of the SKU represent different pieces of information that make it easier to track inventory data. SKU codes are an internal marking of products, instead of product barcodes used between companies. Nevertheless, they can be found printed on labels, embedded in cans, bottles, etc.


Retailers use SKU codes to monitor and record merchandise movements, record prices and other relevant product information, and keep track of inventory.
As mentioned earlier, stock keeping units are used to track and monitor the movement of products and inventory. They are used by a wide variety of organizations, including warehouse managers, ecommerce businesses, and retail stores. But how exactly do they work?
To do this, you need a Point of Sales (POS) or warehouse management system. And those systems need to know these SKU codes and products. When a cashier or warehouse employee scans an item, the system automatically knows the inventory. Then they just scan the barcode (assigned to the SKU).