Write the obituary After we have deined the time of product death, we need to let our software make it stand out. As I mentioned before, most dead items do not appear or smell any different than our living products. Enter the Inventory Obituary. Some folks who use the no-sales-in-12-months deinition refer to this as the " 13th month, irst day report. " The report can be formatted in a simple spreadsheet using these columns: 1. Item Code 2. Description 1: This will help us pull the item out of the live inventory. 3. Quantity On Hand 4. Unit Cost 5. Total Investment: This is the motivational column. 6. Date of Last Sale/Rental: Exclude anything sold/rented within the last 12 months. Run the report and this will become your inventory obituary. In order to really turn up the stink factor, calculate the sum of column 5. Don't be shocked if you have a signiicant amount of money accumulated. Let's just call it job security for some lucky individual to be named later. I will touch on the role of the mortician a little later. Identifying dead products is not an annual event. I recently ran into a software package that recommended running a dead stock report on an annual basis. This is not a good suggestion. We need to be far more proactive than this. If we employed this method, we could tack on an additional 11 months of inventory carrying cost to any items that died in February. I need to know what died every month. Make this report a part of your irst-day-of-the-month routine. Most people like to employ the ostrich approach to dead stock-just stick our head in the sand and hope it goes away. Safety First Tent Rental Division's Ballasting Tool will help keep your event safe Tent Rental Division (TRD) members can use our exclusive Ballasting Tool to provide tested and proven guidelines for safe ballasting of tents in an easy-to-use format. For more information or to join for access to this member-exclusive tool, visit IFAI.com/Ballasting InTentsMag.com 45http://www.IFAI.com/Ballasting http://www.InTentsMag.com