There is good inventory software available, and if you hold straightforward stock in one location, buy it. This page is for the businesses where the standard model does not describe reality.
The usual symptom is a spreadsheet that has to be reconciled against what is physically on the shelf, and a gap between the two that nobody can fully explain.
Where standard packages stop fitting
- Stock exists in several places — a warehouse, a shop, a vehicle, a client site
- Items are assembled or broken down, so what you buy is not what you sell
- You track batches, serial numbers or expiry dates
- Some stock is consignment, or owned by a customer
- Pricing varies by customer, volume or contract
- Stock movements happen away from a desk, on a phone, sometimes without signal
The real cost of not knowing
Inaccurate stock data is expensive in ways that rarely appear as a single line item: capital sitting in stock you did not know you had, orders placed for things already on a shelf, sales lost by quoting an item that is not actually available, and the hours spent counting to resolve the difference.
Working out that figure for your own business is the first thing worth doing, before any conversation about software.
What a custom system does differently
- Models your actual stock structure — locations, assemblies, batches — rather than a simplified version
- Updates as things move, instead of being reconciled afterwards
- Works on a phone, because that is where stock movements happen
- Applies your pricing rules automatically
- Warns before you run out, based on your own lead times
- Keeps a full movement history, so a discrepancy can be traced rather than guessed at
Barcodes, scanning and offline
Most stock errors are typing errors, and scanning removes them. Ordinary phone cameras handle barcode scanning perfectly well for most small businesses, so dedicated hardware is often unnecessary.
Whether the system needs to work without signal — a warehouse with poor coverage, a delivery vehicle — is a question worth answering early, because it meaningfully changes the build.
It should talk to your accounting package
Stock and finance have to agree. A custom system usually handles stock operations and passes the financial consequences to whatever accounting software your bookkeeper already uses, rather than replacing it. What can actually be passed depends on what that package exposes.