Excel inventory management is subpar precisely because it is imprecise in organizing data due to its own flaws, and the errors caused by its users. To accurately forecast the future, you need to gather correct information in the present. One of the primary reasons for keeping detailed reports is to generate accurate and useful business intelligence (BI). If your assistant manager forgets a crucial part of your stocktaking process – like updating your data – and today is when you typically make purchase orders, you may order too much and run into the problem of obsolete stock or order too little and experience stockouts.Įven if you can update inventory information regularly every day, it will never be as instant or reliable as a cloud-based inventory management system. If you think you have enough stock to cover a sudden spike in sales but find out you don’t, you lose customers. Stock is being purchased and received, inventory is being sold and shipped, and your numbers haven’t been updated since yesterday. Lack of Real-Time ReportingĪ lack of real-time inventory reports means that you are constantly behind in your inventory tracking. This means Excel itself can cause errors in your reporting, and it can enhance the errors that humans naturally commit. The study revealed that one-fifth of papers with Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions. Mistakes are easy to make, especially if you’re working with various spreadsheets and multiple people are manually inputting or copying information.īut sometimes the program itself is to blame for mistakes.įor example, a study of leading genomics journals revealed that Excel’s automatic functions were changing the names of genomes without the scientists’ knowledge. While 40% of those errors had little impact on the businesses studied, 7 errors caused massive losses of $4 million to $110 million, according to the researchers’ estimates. In a study of errors in 25 sample spreadsheets, Stephen Powell from the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College found that 15 workbooks contained a total of 117 errors. Problems with Excel Inventory Management Error-prone Without a system that can handle increasingly complex orders, purchases, and stocktakes, you’re going to experience serious issues. If you run a simple 1-4 person operation with little inventory and only 1-2 people inputting inventory information, an excel inventory system will give you what you need.īut if you’re trying to grow your business year after year, release new and exciting products, or expand into new markets and countries, then you’ll need a far more robust supply chain management (SCM) software. If you’re just starting out or maintaining a small business without trying to expand it, then excel inventory tracking would work fine for you. Running a small business with little growth. Excel inventory management is good at the start but doesn’t end well.Įxcel inventory management is good for one thing:
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