Inventory Management in Excel: Tips to Help You Track it All

Read about all the functions and features of your favorite spreadsheet softwares. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. And as we’ve mentioned already, there are plenty of free templates available online that would deliver these features with minimal work on your part. So if you’re feeling intimidated by the sheer amount of Excel knowledge needed to execute any of the ideas above, a template could be a big help. If all that sounds overwhelming, just remember you can always use a template that’s preformatted and includes formulas for easy calculations.

If you have 27 “red apples” for example you would have 27 cells each containing one “red apple.” Measure and track important Inventory and Warehousing metrics using this Key Performance Metrics dashboard developed by Someka.net. Packed with reports and graphs, this template is still fairly simple to customize for tracking the metrics key to your business. Keep track of who is using your equipment, tools, books, etc. with a simple sign out sheet form. This one includes essentially the same columns as the template provided by Vertex 42, but there is also space available to include information about an item’s warranty.

Zervant’s free inventory management template provides a great starting point for small businesses or startups that may have never used Excel to track their stock before. Using Excel for your inventory management is supposed to make the process simpler for you, so it’s important you choose a template that’s easy to use. Otherwise, any time you save on inventory management will be spent on training your teams to use your new platform. Once you have completed your spreadsheet, you need to make sure it’s regularly updated. This includes updating stock levels after sales are made, adding new products as they come into stock, and deleting old lines that are discontinued. But the same growth that landed Nomad products in Best Buy, Urban Outfitters, and Staples, also caused some serious strife.

A personal inventory template is also a useful tool for simply tracking personal collections such as media, artwork, books and other collectible items. The template allows you to categorize your personal items, describe their condition, and document their value. Since this is a free excel template already created for you, it’s also a quick way to track your valuables.

How to Calculate Retail Shrinkage in Excel

This is a detailed workbook that goes beyond a basic inventory spreadsheet. There are additional tabs to track vendors, stock inventory items, and track items on order. Excel spreadsheets are incredibly versatile and can be used to track inventory to just about any size of business or household. Of course, there is inventory software as an alternative, but it can be costly and even have a complex learning curve. Here are the top free Excel inventory templates that we’ve compiled from sources around the web.

An inventory database is essential for any product-based business to flourish. It provides easy access to valuable data and helps make key business decisions, such as ordering new inventory. The inventory spreadsheet should be prepared with enough column names based on the future requirements. The inventory spreadsheet should be prepared based on the requirements of the organization and the column names should be chosen correctly as it can confuse the user. The Server Inventory Template is the most sought after template online. Excel offers tons of functionality, so with a little work, you could definitely bring your Excel spreadsheet up to the same level as a basic inventory software.

Vehicle Maintenance and Fleet Inventory ▶

This allows you to easily see your most popular lines and to determine which may need to be replenished most urgently. There are forms for entering new products to keep track of stock coming in and to monitor stock going out. Datasheets keep track of the compiled user forms as they are entered, so you can see an entire database with the data you’ve entered and search for entries by their unique serial number. You can easily manage your purchase orders, which allows you to keep track of all your products, what stock you’ve got on hand, and the total value of your inventory. There are many inventory management templates available for Excel, which just helps to prove how popular the platform has become for inventory management. Their suppliers were seeking additional reorders, their customers were questioning product delays, and their logistics team was working around the clock to try and keep up.

Naturally, the LEFT function returns you to the first, or first several, characters in a cell, while the RIGHT function jumps you to the last, or last several, characters in a cell. Sign up now to receive our monthly resource round-up email to learn about the latest in CMMS, asset management software, industry news, trends and more… Deliver faster, collaborate better, innovate more effectively — without the high prices and months-long implementation and extensive training required by other products. Excel provides a great platform for keeping track of your data, but it requires you to manually track and calculate the information that has been inputted. This means that you need to be fastidious about how information is entered and constantly vigilant to pick up on any mistakes that may have been made.

Your Excel inventory sheet is one of the most important documents in your business. As mentioned earlier, Excel mistakes happen, and sometimes vital data gets lost. This is known as a perpetual inventory system and it’s one of the best ways inventory-based businesses can save time and increase efficiency. If you don’t understand Excel’s functionality, you may not realize there are more efficient solutions to your inventory tracking challenges.

Why Use an Inventory Template?

Save even more if you’re buying inventory from overseas by using Wise Business to pay international suppliers. Sign up for a free 30 day trial today and find out how PIM can make life easier for your product teams and better for your customers. It is mainly used to locate excess spaces between words, which could cause problems later when performing internal searches for terms. A limitation of the VLOOKUP formula is that it only reads data from left to right. Whether you are operating a small eCommerce business or a major warehouse, inventory matters….

This inventory template from Excel Champs is easy to use, with a free Lite Version, and a paid Pro Version. First of all, both versions have a sleek dashboard and an inventory in and out sheet. The Pro version allows you to manage returns and generate invoices and supplier reports.

When you want to ‘automate’ tasks and calculations within your Excel inventory management template, most people turn to formulas, pivot tables, and conditional formatting. In any of these scenarios, inventory spreadsheets are not going to cut it. The Excel inventory template offers more options for adding the required features in the excel lists. This type of Excel inventory templates acts as the count sheets which is the perfect tool for the business or organization to have regular listing of work done and many more.

Common Excel inventory management formulas

Perhaps the greatest way to appreciate all the benefits of an inventory management system is to learn how it helped other companies flourish. Inventory management software, on the other hand, has the capacity to monitor the comings and goings between your sales channels and warehouses with ease. This collection of real-time data points affords unmatched visibility into exactly what your business is doing. When you want your ecommerce business to reach greater heights, the pitfalls of manual data entry can really weigh you down.

ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that helps you plan, schedule and track resources. We connect teams, departments and even outside vendors, facilitating better collaboration. Join the successful teams at NASA, Siemens and Nestle who already use our software. Inventory managers record daily deliveries, evaluate new shipments and analyze suppliers. These duties are more expansive than what an inventory template can handle, but certainly, an inventory template is one arrow in their quiver when managing their business’ inventory.

• There are a couple easy ways to go about this task — you can use a pre-formatted inventory list template to do this, or you can manually create your sheet.
• Take a look at the items in your inventory to see if they have barcodes.
• And while Excel inventory management can help you get ahead, the next step is to utilize software to really understand and optimize your inventory.

Now that you’ve set up your spreadsheet or chosen your template, you can begin to input the fields that are specific to your business. When using a template, this is an essential step to ensure that the finished spreadsheet reflects your organization’s needs and isn’t just a generic spreadsheet. To manage your inventory in Microsoft Excel, begin by creating a new spreadsheet. Click on the Blank workbook to start with a fresh Excel sheet, or press Ctrl + N.

With Excel, you can create custom formulas and algorithms to track inventory levels, calculate stock quantities, and manage stock orders. This flexibility means you can tailor the templates to your specific needs and requirements, making Excel a handy tool for business inventory management. Excel is a widely-used tool that can help businesses of all Excel inventory sizes manage their inventory effectively. Another disadvantage of using inventory software is that it often comes with a steep learning curve. It may take time and effort to familiarize yourself with all of the features and capabilities, which can be especially challenging for small businesses that do not have the training resources available.

This is useful for calculating how long products have been in your warehouse and could be essential if you’re stocking products that have a short shelf life. RANK functions almost the same as the Sort function, apart from the fact that it automatically ranks your data, whereas Sort only functions when you specifically tell Excel to do so. This means you can set up a spreadsheet to automatically display the rank of your products at all times. For example, you could choose to only use cells in your calculation that refer to a specific product category or only the sales for a specific customer demographic.

When dealing in manufacturing, you’ll have a stock of raw materials or components necessary for assembling the product you make. Manufacturers need to track their inventory to make sure they don’t run out, which would pause any work on the production line. Therefore, manufacturers often split up their inventory count to include raw materials, WIP and finished goods, each requiring storage at different costs.

You can save a lot of time using Autocomplete, provided you do a bit of planning first by using abbreviations for the beginning of each item’s name. Suppose, for example you are counting apples and oranges, and you classify them in three sizes, “small,” “medium” and “large.” So use “s” “m” and “l” instead of the whole words. That way, when you type “s a,” Excel will automatically enter “s apples.” Open Excel, and type “Inventory” or “Items” in the first cell and press Enter. You will need this as a label for the items later when it comes to counting your inventory. Take a look at the items in your inventory to see if they have barcodes.