It’s easy to find heaps of “free” spreadsheet templates for your inventory management. But, there are a lot of downsides to spreadsheets that could be costing your business more than you expect.
Here are the top reasons why spreadsheets might not be the sweet deal they seem.
Your data isn’t up-to-date
Not having the right info is not just a productivity killer, it can cause major disruption to your business. If your records aren’t up to date, your sales reps might agree to an urgent project, because it looks like the stock is there when it’s not. It’s a similar scenario with businesses that sell across both ecom and physical stores. The result? An irate customer that loses confidence in your brand and won’t be coming back.
Spreadsheets are not designed to stay up-to-date all the time. They need to be manually updated, which usually doesn’t happen until the end of the day at best. Even then, because they are manually updated the chances of errors that won’t be caught until your next stocktake (or until something goes wrong) massively increases.
Managing FIFO is almost impossible
FIFO management is a form of inventory management that helps your business to track the changing costs of the stock you buy. So, as stock changes prices, your system can keep track of how many items you have at the old price, and then how many you have with new pricing. It helps make sure you’re charging for the work you need to.
Spreadsheets just aren’t designed to handle that level of complexity, so you might find yourself underquoting when prices change. Without purpose-built tools, you lose some of the control and data around dynamically changing prices.
No good version control
When you have multiple people using stock and keeping records up to date, you’ll likely run into the issue of the document being open at the same time in different places. This can either cause conflicting versions or incorrect records. On the other hand, if you’re not updating as you go, you risk the chance of inaccuracy and your team forget to report their usage.
Wasting time
No matter which way you look at it, spreadsheets take more time to maintain for less benefit to your business. Your admin team might need to spend hours in a week just to keep records almost up-to-date, or your front line staff need to stop what they’re doing to open and edit a spreadsheet taking them away from profitable work. Even though some spreadsheet templates are ‘free’ to access when you factor in the cost of labour they might actually be costing you more than you think.
The worst part is that alongside being time-consuming, they don’t provide top quality or easy to access data. So you’re spending more time on less usable information.
Where does Rype come in?
Rype can help you navigate the move from spreadsheets to inventory management systems that will save you time and money.
Why not shoot an enquiry through on the Contact Us page and have a chat with the team about your business needs.
