Hi there - I wonder if anyone out there can help me? I have a friend, who runs a home furnishing business and wants me to help her out with her accounts. As well as sorting out the general finanace, she really wants to get a grip on her stock levels and in particular which lines are doing well. I thought maybe I could set up tab with all inventory lines to record stock when bought and somehow link it to the sales tab - am I making sense?
I was wondering if anyone knows of any templates which they can point me in the right direction or if anyone has had any experience of this and what they did.
First assess where you land on the spectrum: on one end is the roll-your-own DIY approach using Excel, Calc, or a similar spreadsheet. On the other end lies an out-of-the-box accounting package with an inventory component.
Pulling you toward the DIY end are factors such as pre-existing familiarity with Excel; cost savings; simplicity of your friend's inventory activity, volume, and scope. On the other hand, if your friend's inventory needs (including the tax and accounting issues) are of a more complex flavor, you might incline toward a packaged solution. If the cost is reasonable, and if your friend could make productive use of the other accounting / bookkeeping functionality of the program, you've got more arguments in favor of this approach.
For low- to medium-complexity scenarios Excel can indeed make a nifty inventory tracker and analytics machine. It'll help greatly if you either have, or don't mind investing a bit of time to acquire, a decent level of expertise with the spreadsheet's embedded database-type and filtering capabilities, as well as the so-called "array" formulas. With those under your belt you can certainly make XL behave as a pretty cool little inventory database, complete with automated procedures for generating the data you need for her Sales and Cost of Sales entries, as well as cranking out just about any kind of analytical inventory report she might desire.
I'm sure there are boatloads of templates floating around out there, but because an Excel sheet is like a blank canvas on which it's extremely easy to custom-build your own program, a pre-existing template would have to be very low-cost and very much an "as-is" perfect fit for your friend's situation before it would be a superior alternative to setting up your own.
