Inventory Management Table: Should You Use Excel?

Effective inventory management is vital for your business’s performance and profitability. Without a clear overview of your available products, incoming and outgoing shipments, orders, and deliveries, you risk significant financial and operational issues. Therefore, it’s crucial to implement precise dashboards that let you monitor and optimize the entire supply chain according to your needs. But what’s the best solution for efficient inventory management? Should you use Excel, or are there better software options? Let’s explore the answers below.

1. Essential Elements for Your Inventory Management Table

First, you need to ask the right questions. Whether it’s an Excel spreadsheet or dedicated software, your chosen solution must fit your business’s unique needs. The goal is to simplify your operations and give you a comprehensive view of your inventory flows in one management table. The best way to achieve this is to create a checklist of your priority needs, helping you make an informed choice based on:

• The purpose of your inventory management tool: Better organization? Automating processes? Facilitating decision-making? Improving service quality? Managing your omnichannel strategy?
• Your company’s profile and size: Do you operate in B2B or B2C? On which distribution channels (store, e-commerce, etc.)? Do you need to manage multiple currencies? How many SKUs are in your catalog? How many suppliers do you have? Do you have one or multiple warehouses/points of sale?
• Useful functionalities: Real-time management, multi-warehouse, multi-store franchise, receiving/shipping, purchase management, contact centralization, sales management with accounting follow-up (quotes, purchase orders, invoices, payments), statistics…
• Information system: Does the tool need to integrate with other solutions you already use? If so, can the chosen solution share information with your current tools?
• Technical aspects: Open-source tool, SaaS subscription with regular updates, hosted on the cloud or a local server?
• Support: What maintenance offer? At what cost? Is the tool easy for all users to handle?

Excel or Software: Where and Why to Invest?

While Excel is a familiar and reliable tool for managers and merchants, it quickly shows its limitations in inventory management. Manual processing leads to significant time loss and inevitable human errors, such as typos, incorrect formulas, and missed updates. Keep in mind that Excel is not automated, making real-time inventory tracking impossible. Moreover, data security with Excel is far less reliable compared to specialized software, which securely backs up your data and protects it from loss and operational disruptions.

Criteria for Choosing the Right Software

Choosing the right solution means looking beyond the inventory management table. As mentioned, immediacy and automation are crucial for ensuring product availability and improving store performance. Therefore, real-time tracking is the cornerstone of effective inventory management software. Purchases, receptions, movements, inventory—your software must provide a 360° view of your flows and assist in managing your order book, considering pricing, potential promotions, and market trends.

Using Excel for inventory management is outdated for today’s merchants. In the digital age, management software enables the automation of the entire value chain, real-time tracking of warehouse flows, and the unification of points of sale. These are essential to ensure better customer satisfaction and enhanced performance. Choosing the right inventory management software means securing key functionalities for process optimization and business growth.