Here's Why You Need to Ditch Excel for Inventory Management in 2024

In 1985, Microsoft launched Excel in direct competition with Lotus 1-2-3, the reigning champion at the time.

Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, a platform Lotus 1-2-3 didn’t serve, Excel provided an accessible and, for the time, user-friendly interface that made it easy for people to manage formulas, perform mathematical functions, and organize their spreadsheets.

It was, in short, the spreadsheet to beat for years.

Part of the Microsoft 365 platform, Excel is used by millions of people and businesses globally.  It is also one of the most commonly used forms of inventory management for new and small businesses because it is well-known, and comes as part of an incredibly well-known operating system.

Yes, Excel is excellent at what it does. The problem is that it wasn’t designed for inventory management and supporting a growing ecommerce business at speed.

Why isn’t Excel good enough for my inventory?

Great question. Excel isn’t horrifying for inventory management. You can use it as a starting point, but as your business grows, you will need something a lot more agile and efficient.

These are some of the biggest issues you’re likely to face if you continue to use Excel as your primary inventory management tool.

It takes a long time to create

Creating and customizing an Excel inventory management spreadsheet is complicated and time-consuming.

You have to know how to use the platform properly, and the best shortcuts and formulas for your inventory management needs. Excel does allow you to do cool things like alphabetizing your inventory, creating templates, and leveraging formulas and functions to manage and categorize your data, but understanding these so you can make the most of them takes time.

That said, it’s worth keeping hold of your Excel documents and any work you’ve done on your inventory if you move across to a dedicated inventory management solution. Excel helps you track products well and can be used as a backup.

It’s not scalable

When your inventory volume increases thanks to your steady business growth, Excel becomes unwieldy and complex to manage.

Once your inventory reaches medium size, you’re going to be dealing with an increasing number of columns that are complicated and overwhelming and take a lot of time to manage, track and update.

Often, when companies continue to work with Excel for their inventory, they end up finding errors in the numbers because the amount of manual labor involved in managing the columns and data is extensive.

You also start losing a cohesive picture of your inventory levels as navigating your data is a slow and laborious process.

When Excel becomes your primary inventory management tool, you’re not going to escape the reality of 100s of columns, thousands of cells, and dizzying volumes of data which are also going to slow down your computer. There’s so much data, systems tend to slow down to the point of frustration.

Further reading: A Comprehensive Guide to Multi-Warehouse Management

Limited automation

Even though Excel is now powered by Microsoft Copilot, the company’s artificial intelligence tool, it doesn’t have the level of automation provided by a dedicated inventory management software.

You do have to rely on a lot of manual work and data entry to ensure your Excel is up to date and your inventory is managed properly.

There are also limited Excel integrations across key solutions, such as point of sale, and those that are available can be challenging to integrate smoothly.

When you’re dealing with large volumes of multi-channel orders, you need a solution that’s capable of automatically updating your stock levels across all the channels you use. Excel doesn’t have this capability and this can affect your efficiencies.

You need a solution capable of easily and quickly integrating with your other systems so you gain a 360-degree view of your data and inventory that’s as close to real-time as possible.

Any investment you make into an inventory tool also needs to reduce the amount of manual labor – you want to spend your time working on your business and customers, not on your data.

Data entry can complicate things

Data capture, alongside scalability, is another way errors can creep into your inventory management within Excel.

While the two are very obviously connected, it’s important to highlight that even with a fresh-faced, brand-new business, you’re going to run the risk of making mistakes if you enter every single 12-digit UPC code into your inventory software.

Entering a code incorrectly is an easy mistake to make and you will then have to manually correct these codes when the errors reveal themselves.

This type of error isn’t just painful when you’re handling large orders or dealing with a stock-out issue, it’s also frustrating when you hit the end of the year audit.

Unfortunately, data capture errors often result in write-offs, audit problems, and cost to company and Excel with its spreadsheet structure is not ideally suited to helping you reduce these errors and save your company money.

Further reading: How to Set-Up Your Warehouse Inventory

But, where is it?

Excel lacks two other core functionalities you need from an inventory management solution – the ability to search for information at speed, and the ability to analyze that information.

Excel’s search function is clunky when dealing with vast quantities of data. It’s hard to find something quickly and it can be confusing for people to ensure they’re looking at the right information.

You also can’t use the data to unpack your business performance or see your sales or assess how different channels are performing.

Ultimately, Excel allows you to categorize and store your data but doesn’t allow you to analyze it, unpick performance, discover potential bottlenecks or opportunities for growth, and manage stock-outs effectively. Its bulk reduces efficiencies and limits visibility.

Further reading: How to Design Your Warehouse for Maximum Efficiency

An intelligent alternative to Excel for inventory management

If you’ve hit all those Excel walls, or you’re starting out and would like to avoid them completely, then this is where you start. Veeqo's inventory management tool is capable of providing you with a centralized dashboard, real-time insights, seamless stock management, and a cloud-based inventory that doesn’t slow your computer to a crawl.

The other bonus is that Veeqo comes with no monthly cost and is completely free to use.

Quick and easy inventory management

Veeqo's inventory management tool is designed to make it extremely easy for you to capture your inventory and data within an automated and agile environment.

Instead of wading through complex manual spreadsheets, you can use Veeqo to automatically keep your inventory levels up-to-date across multiple channels including Amazon, eBay, Shopify and Walmart.

The solution is designed to ensure you know exactly what you have in stock, what you’ve sold and at which marketplace, what stock isn’t selling, and what stock is selling well.

It offers you a level of granular visibility that changes how you engage with your inventory, allowing you to make informed decisions that connect directly with what your customers want and the channels they use.

Further reading: How to Choose an Inventory Management Software

Tick all your inventory management boxes

When you move across to Veeqo, you get a bundle of benefits that can transform how you feel about inventory. It’s going to feel a lot less like you’ve got to wade through columns and complexity to find the answers you seek.

Ben Chappell, co-founder of toy retailer, eChapps, says: “One way Veeqo has been able to save us lots of time with order fulfillment is it combines all the different channels that we sell on into one list with all our orders, and we can then sort by SKU within that. So we can ship out and print out all the orders with the same SKU across all the different channels, from one place. So we’re not having to go from channel, to channel, to channel, printing out orders and shipping out that way.“

Some of the key benefits that come bundled with Veeqo include:

• You can automatically allocate orders to a specific location based on sales. This allows you to avoid overselling as your orders go to the channel they came from and your inventory counts at all your locations.

• You can sell your stock as individual items or create bundles for upsells, cross-sells and marketing promotions. You don’t even need to set up your stock in pre-packaged kits – the Veeqo inventory page allows you to create bundles at any time. This is a superb way of selling old inventory or products and Veeqo will help you track sales across individual and bulk items.

• You can automate your inventory rules and repetitive tasks which is a huge admin relief. These inventory rules work with your stores to adjust and advertise different stock levels across your stores. The rules can be used to create urgency on a listing, set aside units for retail stores and walk-in customers, leave a stock buffer, and meet your eBay listing limits, among others.

• You can leverage Amazon’s fulfillment network and expertise to power the growth of your ecommerce business because Veeqo is integrated with Amazon Multi-channel Fulfillment. This lets you manage your shipping, inventory, and fulfillment all in one place.

• You will appreciate the easy integrations. There are hundreds of native integrations for ecommerce marketplaces, 3PL, accounting, point of sale, shipping carriers and so much more included within Veeqo. And if none of these integrations work for you, the Veeqo API is available for your developers to create your own custom integrations.

• Veeqo offers bulk label printing. This can save your team hours of time as you're able to print up to 100 labels at once, instead of individually.

• You get forecasting analytics and reporting built in. The Veeqo suite of sales reporting, analytics and forecasting tools give you immediate, real-time visibility into your inventory so you can make intelligent decisions that directly influence customer engagement and sales.

Veeqo has inventory management sorted

Veeqo has been designed to be as easy to use as possible – there is no memorizing formulas or learning shortcuts or figuring out how to customize spreadsheets. Using Veeqo's intuitive interface, you will be set up, connected, and operating at speed.

Free to use, Veeqo is focused on helping you scale your business within a trusted all-in-one software capable of delivering exactly the right levels of automation, visibility, control, and management you need.

So what are you waiting for? Sign-up to Veeqo now and create efficiencies in your business as you scale.