As a business owner, it’s important to keep track of your goods or properties so you can decide on what to do next. To do this, making an inventory spreadsheet using Google Sheets or Excel is straightforward, inexpensive, and convenient. This document will help you stay on track when monitoring your inventory.
Inventory Spreadsheets
How do you list inventory?
A well-made inventory spreadsheet and tracking system should have the following key elements:
- All of the locations where you plan to store your items.
- Well-organized, unique, and consistent descriptions of the inventory items.
- Short item identifiers that you keep short with consistent formatting.
- Units of measure formatted consistently and used correctly.
- A starting count of all of your inventory items, where they’re located, and other significant information.
- Solid policies for inventory management that you will train your employees in.
Inventory Templates
The benefits of using an inventory spreadsheet
The use of an inventory template varies and may depend on whether you’re managing personal possession, food stocks, business assets, or other kinds of inventory. However you plan to use this spreadsheet, there are basic benefits you can get from using these for your inventory management:
- Take a look at your current inventory
With a spreadsheet, you can easily gain access to the quantities of your products that are currently on stock. This is the first step in ensuring that your operations run smoothly. - Manage reordering
The regular tracking of inventories helps in accurately identifying when certain products need reordering and which items you will discontinue. - Create your business statistics
With the template, you can view your sales, study your sales patterns, monitor your top suppliers, and identify your bestselling items. - Protect your investments
If you’re a homeowner looking for insurance coverage for your personal property. As a business owner, this benefit is important for tracking your tools, equipment, merchandise or even computer hardware. The template informs you of what you have in your stocks, where you have placed these items, and what they’re worth. This helps you maintain your assets while keeping you informed so you know when you need to upgrade. - Saves you money and time
This especially applies to small businesses. Having an inventory template allows you to enter data easily, access products quickly, and know the order details related to your inventory.
How do you create an inventory system?
One of the most important parts of businesses is inventory management and for this, you need an inventory spreadsheet. You can create a template that can be readily printed and shared in a couple of minutes. Create your inventory system by following these steps:
- Insert a table.
- Customize the table then edit the content.
- Add your business details and your logo.
- Input your inventory list.
If you can manage your inventory, you will always have the correct products in the appropriate quantity on-hand. At the same time, you can avoid products getting out of stock or funds getting tied up in excess stocks.
You also get the assurance that your products will get sold on time to avoid obsolescence, spoilage, or spending too much on stocks that take up valuable space in your stockroom or warehouse.
Excel Inventory Templates
How do I make an inventory spreadsheet in Excel?
You can refer to inventory management as the backbone for any business with products to sell. Using Microsoft Excel can be an excellent tool to create your first inventory spreadsheet. Consider the following pointers when making your own Excel inventory template:
- Avoid mistakes and pitfalls with inventory management Excel
Surprisingly, many professionals don’t use Excel in their inventory management because they believe that humans tend to make mistakes. But finding mistakes on sheets of hard data and numbers can be truly challenging unless you know what you need. You can avoid such errors by creating a daily review and self-auditing. - Update right away
Make sure that whoever handles orders should immediately update the document to avoid issues. Excel isn’t a real-time solution for inventory management and as such, you will never see the real value of your inventory at that moment. This is why you should update the document as often as possible to prevent any issues related to your inventory. - Consolidate your data
If you can take time to consolidate your data each month, this allows you to make charts that show how much you have sold for that month. You must do this on a regular basis while paying attention to special occasions and holidays.
One of the main problems people have when using Excel is not analyzing historical data. But if you can spend some time to add the whole month’s data into a pivot table that’s easy-to-read, you can fix this problem.
Although this is time-consuming, it enables you to keep track of your sales based on a certain period for inventory optimization. When using Excel, here are some steps to guide you:
Click Insert, Tables, then click PivotTable.
Choose the table range in the dialog box that pops up.
Select the new pivot table’s location.
Click ‘OK’.
Customize the pivot table. - Review the data
Although Excel is an important tool for keeping track of inventory, its efficiency solely depends on how you keep track of and calculate everything. This means that you must review all of the figures that you used in your computations to make that they are all correct. This prevents time-consuming and expensive mistakes in the future. - Review and audit
You have to manually enter data in Excel unless you have connected a barcode scanner to your system. Even if this was the case, not everything is completely automated. As such, the process can still lead to human errors that might throw off your whole demand and supply. For instance, when you end up reordering too many stocks, not enough stocks or if you either overestimate or underestimate your profits. - Know when it’s time to upgrade
Excel doesn’t work as effectively with medium to large inventory volumes because these require hundreds of columns that might be too time-consuming, complex, and challenging to monitor and update. At some point in the future, there will be a need to upgrade to a more dedicated system for inventory management, and as a business owner, you must know when to do so.