Spreadsheet or inventory app: which fits your shop?

Almost every shop that tracks stock on a computer starts with a spreadsheet. It is free, you already know how to open it, and it does exactly what you tell it. That is a good reason to start there, and for some shops it is a good reason to stay.

This guide is not here to tell you a spreadsheet is a mistake. It is here to help you work out whether yours is still doing the job, and what you would gain or lose by moving to an app. If you are still deciding what to record at all, begin with how to track inventory in a small shop, because the method matters more than the tool.

A spreadsheet works well when the job is small and one person owns it. Check how many of these describe your shop.

• You stock a small range. Under a hundred or so products, and the list rarely changes.
• One person does everything. You take the money, receive the deliveries and update the file. There is no one else to disagree with.
• You count rather than track. You do a stock check every week or two and note the numbers, instead of expecting the file to be right every hour.
• You do not need to see profit by product. Knowing what to reorder is enough.
• You like it. An owner who enjoys a tidy sheet will keep it up. Enjoyment is an underrated feature.

If that is you, a spreadsheet is a sensible, low-cost choice. Spend your effort on a good layout and a regular routine, not on shopping for software. A sheet that is updated every week beats an app that is opened every month.

The trouble with a spreadsheet is not the first month. It is the second year. These are the points where owners most often feel the strain.

Sales never reach the file

A spreadsheet only knows what you type into it. If every sale also has to be typed in, the file is out of date the moment the shop gets busy, and nobody has time to catch up. Most abandoned inventory spreadsheets die this way. The alternative, updating the quantities from a weekly count, works but tells you nothing about what happened in between.

Two people, one file

As soon as an employee or family member helps, the file needs rules. Who can change a quantity? What happens when two people edit at once? Spreadsheets will happily let anyone overwrite a number, and they will not tell you who did it. They also show everyone the cost column, which is not always what you want a cashier to see.

Overwriting hides the history

When you type 14 over 17, the 17 is gone. You cannot tell whether three were sold, damaged or taken. A record of movements solves this, but it takes discipline to build by hand and formulas to roll it into a current total. Formulas also break: a deleted row, a sorted column or a pasted cell can quietly change a total without any warning.

No nudge when stock runs low

A sheet can highlight a cell when quantity falls under the minimum, but only if you open it and only if the quantity is current. It cannot tap you on the shoulder on a Tuesday afternoon. For a fuller look at minimums, see how to set reorder points.

Working at the counter

Spreadsheets are comfortable on a laptop and awkward on a phone. Searching a long list with a thumb, mid-conversation with a customer, is where many owners give up and go back to the notebook.

An inventory app is mostly the same record, with the typing taken out. The point is not clever features. It is that the sale, the stock change and the history happen in one step.

• Sales update stock automatically. The number drops when the item is sold, with no second entry.
• Every change has a reason and a time. Sold, received, returned, damaged, expired or corrected, and you can look back at any product.
• Different access for different people. A cashier can sell without seeing your costs and profit.
• Reminders and lists. You are told when stock crosses the minimum, and a restock list is built for you.
• Reports without formulas. Best sellers, slow movers and stock value come from the same records, so you are not maintaining a second set of numbers.

An app also has costs. You have to learn it, you have to move your product list across, and you depend on it staying available. A badly chosen app that is hard to use at the counter is worse than a sheet you understand. Look for one that lets you start with a name, a price and a quantity, and that handles imports so you do not retype what you already have.

The table is tilted toward apps on day-to-day work, and toward spreadsheets on flexibility and cost. Both are fair. Which rows matter depends on how your shop runs.

Take a shop with 150 products. It makes about 60 sales a day. Suppose an average sale has 3 items, which is 180 item lines a day, or around 5,400 a month.

Typing each line into a spreadsheet takes about 10 seconds including finding the row. That is 54,000 seconds a month, or 15 hours. Nobody does this, which is why spreadsheet-run shops switch to updating from a weekly count. A weekly count of 150 products at about 20 seconds each is 50 minutes a week, so roughly 3.5 hours a month. Affordable, but now the file is only accurate on count day.

Now consider what a weekly count cannot see. If bottled water sells 7 a day, a count on Sunday that shows 4 left tells you the shelf emptied sometime during the week. You do not know when, and you cannot tell if you lost sales on Thursday because the shelf was bare. Say that happened two days. At $0.75 gross profit a bottle and 7 a day, that is about $10.50 of profit missed on one product. Across ten popular products, it is around $105 in a week.

Ask yourself these questions honestly. They are more useful than a feature list.

1. Is my spreadsheet accurate right now? Pick five products and check the shelf. If four or five match, your routine works. If most are off, the tool is not the only problem, but it is part of it.
2. How many people touch the stock? One means a spreadsheet is fine. Two or more means you need to know who changed what.
3. Do I know what I sold yesterday, by product? If the answer takes more than a minute, you are losing information.
4. Have I run out of a top seller in the last month without warning? If yes, reminders are worth having.
5. Do I want staff to see my costs and profit? If not, a spreadsheet is a weak place to keep them.
6. Will I enjoy keeping this up? Be honest. The best system is the one that survives a bad week.

If you answered in favour of the spreadsheet on most of these, stay with it and make it better. If you answered against it on three or more, you will probably save time and avoid loss by moving.

Moving too early, before you have a routine

A tool will not fix a shop that has no habit of recording deliveries or counting shelves. Get the routine working on paper or a sheet first. Then any app only has to make a working routine easier.

Moving too late

Owners often wait until the spreadsheet is a disaster, with months of missing entries, before they try anything else. By then, a clean start is more work. Move while the data is still mostly right.

Building a monster sheet

Nested formulas, colour codes and hidden columns make a file that only its author understands. If you are building something that needs a manual, you are building software, and a ready-made app may be cheaper in hours.

Choosing on features, not on the counter

A long feature list means little if finding a product takes five taps while a customer waits. Try any app on the device you will really use, with your own products, before you commit.

Forgetting your exit

Before you move any data into an app, check you can get it out again, ideally as a spreadsheet or CSV file. Your product list and history belong to you.

• Clean the spreadsheet first: one row per product, one name per product, sizes in the name.
• Do a stock count so that the quantities you bring across are true.
• Check that the app can import a CSV or Excel file, and look at a preview before you commit it.
• Try a handful of sales and a delivery on the app before you run the shop on it.
• Keep the old sheet, read-only, for a month or two as a backup.
• Decide who gets owner access and who only needs to sell.
• Set minimums for your top 20 products first, and widen from there.
• Run a short count after the first week and compare it to the app.

If you are moving from handwritten records rather than a sheet, moving from a notebook to inventory software covers the same ground.

Shopkeepa is built so you do not need to choose between a tool you control and one that does the work. You can import your existing list from a CSV or Excel file, check a preview, and start with just a name, a price and a quantity. Sales take stock off automatically, and every movement is kept with a reason, so the history a spreadsheet makes you build by hand is already there.

Owners and cashiers get different access, so staff can sell without seeing costs or profit. Minimums give you one reminder and a restock list. Read more about inventory tracking. Shopkeepa is in development, and early access shops will help shape it.