Inventory management: the small-business version that actually gets kept

Inventory management is the practice of knowing what you have, where it is, and what it cost. Most small businesses start with a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is not the problem — the problem is that stock moves faster than anyone updates it. Within a month the count is fiction, and once it is fiction people stop consulting it, which makes it worse.

The fix is a shorter routine, not a bigger system.

The minimum that works

• A stable SKU per item. Not the supplier's code, not the name — your own code that never changes, because everything else keys off it.
• One row per item with: SKU, name, unit, quantity on hand, location, cost, and reorder point.
• Every movement recorded as a movement — received, sold, returned, written off — rather than by editing the quantity. The history is what lets you find the discrepancy later.
• A reorder point per item, so the question "what do we need to buy" has an answer without a stock take.
• One person responsible for the count being true. Shared responsibility is why counts drift.

Record movements, not balances. If someone edits the on-hand number directly, the difference between the count and reality becomes invisible — and reconciling it later means counting everything by hand. A movement log turns a discrepancy into a question with a date on it.

Counting without stopping the business

1. Do a full count once to establish a baseline, ideally outside trading hours, with two people and a printed list.
2. After that, cycle count: a handful of items every week rather than everything once a year. High-value and fast-moving items more often.
3. Investigate differences immediately, while the paperwork is recent. A discrepancy found in January about October is unresolvable.
4. Write off damaged and lost stock explicitly rather than quietly adjusting the count — write-offs are information about the business.
5. Reconcile against purchases and sales monthly, not annually.
6. Keep the count and the accounting valuation aligned; your accountant will need both to agree at year end.

When a spreadsheet stops being enough

The spreadsheet survives longer than most software vendors admit. It breaks at four points: when two people need to update stock at the same time, when items have variants that multiply rows, when you sell through more than one channel and each has its own view of availability, or when barcode scanning would remove real manual work.

Until then, a table with a movement log is genuinely enough — and it is auditable in a way that a half-configured inventory system is not.

In practice that means Ettex Sheets for the ledger — 150+ functions with instant recalculation, conditional formatting to flag anything below its reorder point, sorting, filtering and pivots for large tables, cell comments where a discrepancy needs a note, version history to roll the whole sheet back, and export to XLSX, CSV or ODS. When rows outgrow a flat grid, Ettex Records takes the same data as typed tables with relations, saved views per location and revision history at cell level. Neither is a warehouse system: there is no barcode scanning, no multi-channel stock sync and no purchase-order automation, and if you need those, a dedicated inventory product is the right answer.

What makes counts go wrong

• Editing quantities instead of logging movements.
• Two people counting the same shelf on different days and both updating.
• Stock in more than one location with no location field.
• Free stock and reserved stock treated as the same number, so you sell what is already promised.
• No write-off habit, so shrinkage accumulates invisibly until year end.

Inventory management is a routine before it is a system: stable SKUs, recorded movements, reorder points, and one person who owns the count. Get those and the spreadsheet will carry you further than you expect.