Digital inventory management
- Variance in units (negative is a shortfall)
- -86
- What the shortfall cost you to replace
- $1,075
- Count accuracy, percent of expected found
- 96.4
The arithmetic on these sheets is your own count: units, unit cost and reorder point in, variance and value out. Nothing is estimated and no industry average is applied to your numbers. Where a page states an outside figure it names the document it came from and links to it.
Digital inventory management is usually sold as a change of tool and is really a change of habit. The clipboard is not the problem; the problem is that nobody writes down what left the shelf, and a phone in the same hands as the clipboard writes down exactly as little. What going digital genuinely buys you is history, arithmetic that cannot be fudged, and more than one person seeing the same number. What it does not buy you is discipline, and a business that goes digital hoping to buy discipline ends up paying a subscription for a slower clipboard.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Digitise the count before you digitise the shelf
The count is one sheet, a few fields and immediate arithmetic, and it is the part of the job where a screen beats paper on the first day. The full item master, with locations, suppliers, costs and reorder points, takes weeks and pays off much later. Businesses that do those in the other order usually stop somewhere in the middle.
Make recording a pull cheaper than not recording it
Every leak in a small operation is somebody in a hurry. If logging a part takes four taps and a login, it will not happen. If it is one screen on a phone already in their hand, it might. This is a design question about your own process, not a feature question about anybody's product.
Keep the arithmetic where you can see it
Variance in units, variance in money, accuracy and the reorder gap should be on the same screen as the entry, not in a report somebody runs monthly. The value of digital here is that the consequence of what you typed appears while you are still standing at the shelf.
Keep the history, because that is the actual product
Any tool can tell you what is on the shelf today. What you are paying for is being able to say that accuracy went from 94 to 98 over three counts, that the shortfall halved after you introduced dockets, and which lines it is still concentrated in. A tool you cannot ask that of is a calculator with a login.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Is a spreadsheet digital enough? For the arithmetic, yes, and for one person it is often the right answer. It stops being enough when two people need the same version, when you want the history without archiving files by hand, or when the sheet has grown formulas nobody else understands.
What should I digitise first? The twenty lines that hold most of the value, and the count itself. Everything else can arrive slowly. A partial list that is accurate is useful; a complete list that is stale is what makes people go back to looking on the shelf.
Do I need barcodes to call it digital? No. Barcodes reduce keying errors and speed up a large count, and they add a project: labels, a scanner, a numbering scheme and somebody to maintain it. Below a few hundred lines the typing is not your bottleneck.
Will this connect to my accounting? It can, and for most small businesses it should not at first. The accounting link matters once a year at valuation, and wiring it early adds a mapping exercise to a project whose main risk is not finishing.
What about stock on vans or at customer sites? Treat each as a location and count it on its own rhythm. The mistake is holding it as one blended number, which hides that the shortfall is almost always in one van rather than across the business.
How long before it is worth it? Two counts. The first gives you a baseline that is probably unflattering; the second tells you whether anything changed. If the second count is not better, the tool was not the problem and the process is where to look.
Will the Digital inventory management fit what you count?
Tell us what you are counting and how you count it today, and we will tell you whether Stocktaka fits before you pay for anything.