Running Stock on Excel: When to Switch

The short answer first

With a few hundred SKUs, one warehouse and one person entering stock, Excel works and there is no reason to rush. The threshold that matters is not how many products you carry — it is how many people edit the same file, and how many places goods move between.

The clearest signal is the moment someone asks which file is the current one. That question means the spreadsheet has become a shared database, which is a job Excel was never built for and no formula fixes.

What Excel is genuinely good at

Flexibility is the thing packaged software struggles to match. Need another column? Add it now. Need an odd calculation only your business does? Write it and move on. For a company whose counting rules are still settling, locking into a fixed system early makes the work harder, not easier.

The other advantage is that everyone already knows how to use it. No training, no per-seat licence, opens on any machine. For a young business that cost is zero, which matters a great deal while cash is tight.

So for plenty of businesses the honest answer is: not yet. What is worth doing is knowing where the line sits, and switching when you cross it rather than when it starts to feel overdue.

Six signs the spreadsheet has stopped coping

These have one thing in common: every one of them costs real money that never appears as a line item, so it stays invisible until you sit down and work it out.

• More than one version of the stock file is circulating and people have to ask which is current
• The number in the file and the goods on the shelf routinely disagree, and you only find out at month-end count
• The same lines get re-keyed into accounting or the sales system every day
• Things run out with no warning, because nothing flags a line below its reorder point
• A second warehouse or shop opened and now there are two files that cannot be totalled together
• When a number is wrong, nobody can tell who changed it or when

What sits between Excel and a bespoke system

Most people frame this as two options: keep suffering, or commission something expensive. There are at least four steps, and the right move is the cheapest one that actually solves the problem.

First, fix the spreadsheet. Move it to Google Sheets or OneDrive so it edits concurrently and keeps a version history, lock the cells that should not be touched, and give the person entering data a form rather than a raw grid. This is free and removes most of the which-file-is-current problem on its own.

Second, no-code app builders — AppSheet, Access — which build straight on the table you already have and take days rather than months. They suit settled processes with a handful of users. Two limits show up later: per-user licensing that climbs faster than expected, and the fact that these systems are usually built by one employee. When that person leaves, nobody else can change it.

Third, off-the-shelf inventory software: pay monthly, start today. It fits when your way of working is not far off everyone else's in your industry. Fourth, a bespoke system, which pays off only when the way you work is itself the advantage, and packaged software would force you to give it up.

The four options side by side

This compares on the criteria owners actually decide by, not feature counts. Read the last row first — who can maintain it is the question most often skipped and the one that hurts most when something breaks.

The costs that are not in the file

Excel looks free because its cost is not paid in money. It is paid in hours and in stock that goes missing. It is worth pricing once.

If the person handling stock loses an hour a day to re-keying and to working out which number is right, that is roughly 250 hours a year, for one person. Multiply by their hourly cost and set it beside the annual software fee you are hesitating over.

The larger cost is harder to see: goods you did not have when a customer ordered, and goods you over-ordered that are now sitting still. Both come from not seeing true quantities in time, and both are usually a multiple of the wasted labour.

How to migrate without stopping work

Do not move everything at once. Start with the single warehouse or product group causing the most pain, run the new system alongside the spreadsheet for one full month, then compare the closing figures. Retire the old file only once they agree.

Clean the data before you move it. Duplicate SKUs, the same product spelled three ways, and units that mix pieces with cartons are the three things that make migrations overrun — and they are work your own team can do far more cheaply than an outside vendor.

Finally, keep the last spreadsheet, read-only. Do not delete it. The first year after a switch always brings questions about historical numbers, and that file is the only record of what they were.