Spare parts inventory management software
- 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.
Most spare parts inventory management software is sold on features that a parts room with four hundred lines will never switch on: multi-warehouse transfers, demand forecasting, serialised traceability, purchase approval chains. The four questions that actually decide whether a small operation keeps using the thing after month three are much duller than the demo, and none of them is on the feature grid. Here is what to ask, and what each answer is worth to you in money you can compute before you buy.
Open the Inventory spreadsheet template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Ask what happens the first time somebody pulls a part without recording it
This is the failure mode of every parts room and no software prevents it. What good software does is make the correction cheap: a count that can be entered against the shelf, a variance the system accepts as the new truth, and a record of the adjustment. Software that makes you justify every discrepancy in a workflow is software your fitters will route around.
Ask whether the reorder point is yours or the vendor's
A reorder point computed by the product from its own model is useless when your usage is lumpy and your lead time is one supplier who answers the phone. You want to be able to set it per line, as a level or as a share of expected, and to override it without an argument.
Ask what one line costs you to hold, and whether the product can tell you
The figure that pays for the software is the value sitting still. Get it out of your own count first: expected units times your own unit cost per line, sorted descending, and the top twenty lines are usually most of the money. Any product that cannot produce that same list from your data is not a parts system, it is a catalogue.
Ask how you get everything back out
Your part numbers, quantities, locations, costs and count history, as a file, on the day you ask, without a support ticket. A parts list that lives only inside somebody's product is a parts list you will rebuild by hand when you leave, and rebuilding it by hand is a week of somebody's time.
Stock counts: what people ask before the first one
Do I need software at all, or will a spreadsheet do? A spreadsheet does the arithmetic perfectly well and fails at history and at more than one person. If you want to know what the variance was in March, or if two people count, the record is the thing you are buying, not the sums.
What should it cost? Small-business parts tools are typically priced per user per month, which means the real question is how many people need to touch it. Price it at the number of people who will actually count and pull, not at headcount, and compare that annual figure with the value of the shortfall your first count finds.
Does it need to connect to my accounts? Only if you value stock for the accounts, and if you do, the IRS small business guidance is the place to start on what that valuation has to be. For most small parts rooms the useful link is the other way: the count tells the accounts what the shelf is worth once a year, and nothing needs to be live.
What is the single most common reason these projects fail? The list is never finished. A parts catalogue that is eighty per cent entered is worse than a clipboard, because people stop trusting it and go back to looking. Enter the fast-moving lines first, get those right, and let the tail arrive over a year.
Will the Spare parts inventory management software 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.