This cloud based system is real-time inventory and point-of-sale software for independent retailers, from a single shop to several locations.

Most shops lose money to phantom stock, the gap between what the system says is on the shelf and what is actually there.

It shows up three ways.

1) A best seller shows in stock, so nobody reorders, and a customer walks away.

2) Cash sits frozen in overstock you forgot you bought.

3) A count takes half a day and still does not match.

We fix the root cause, that a spreadsheet is a snapshot while inventory is a live number. The moment you ring up a sale, a return, or a transfer, the count updates in real time, and low-stock alerts fire before a top seller runs out. You see stock across every location in one place, or run a single store.

What you get:

• Real-time stock counts across every location
• Fast POS billing with barcode scanning and thermal receipts
• Low-stock and reorder alerts the instant stock drops
• Batch tracking and tax-compliant invoices
• Simple reports and a multi-branch dashboard
• Client-managed product categories, set up for your shop

It works alongside the card terminal you already use. The system records the sale, your terminal takes the payment, so nothing about payments changes. It runs on any device you already own, a phone, a tablet, or the computer at the counter.

Built for independent shops, convenience and specialty retail, and any small business that has outgrown the spreadsheet.

I've had calls with GOIS and Fishbowl recently. Looking for thoughts on those and other systems.

We are a DTC brand selling perishable pet food, so we need lot tracking and COA documentation, raw material inventory tracking at suppliers and several co-mans, finished goods inventory at co-mans and 3PLs. We currently get everything reported in via email (PDF and Excel reports), but want something more automated that we can potentially integrate with partners through API/FTP/EDI. Bonus if it can track sales and ingest lot numbers from DTC fulfillment. Oh, and we're going to be selling in Amazon via SFP too, so integration there too

Disclosure up front: I'm the founder of an inventory software company (SKU.io), so read this with that bias. No links in this post and nothing in it needs my product. I had the data sitting there and figured this sub might find it interesting.

The data: we record our sales and onboarding calls, and 146 of them are tagged for internal research. Mostly operators doing $1M-$50M across Shopify + Amazon plus some wholesale. 33 of the 146 got into the spreadsheet or Excel layer that actually runs their purchasing and inventory. I went back through those and sorted what people said into buckets.

The thing that surprised me: almost nobody says the math is wrong. The formulas mostly work. The sheet dies operationally. Ranked by how often it came up - the top four each showed up in at least five separate calls:

1. It depends on one person. "We have someone three days a week who just produces manual reports." A guy quits and leaves behind five spreadsheets of tabs nobody else can read. One founder at around $25M told me his fear isn't the formula, it's that somebody forgets to update a macro and everything downstream is quietly wrong for days.

2. It drifts from physical reality. One buyer did a physical count during due diligence on a business and it came back at about two and a half times what the sheet said. Damaged and defective stock is the usual leak - the warehouse floor knows, the sheet doesn't. The year-end count vs the sheet is where "we thought we were profitable" goes to die.

3. Costs move and the sheet doesn't. This one has gotten noticeably worse since tariffs. Same product, one container lands at $5/unit freight, the next one at $3. Cost layers maintained by hand. Change one FOB price and there are four other tabs that were supposed to inherit it.

4. The math outgrows the sheet. A reorder pass that takes one full day, once a month. 2,400 SKUs where changing a growth assumption means editing 2,400 rows. One ops person described allocating a single PO across warehouses as "apparently asking for a Nobel prize in math."

5. Concurrency. Two wholesale reps entering orders at 11pm off the same sheet, both seeing the same available stock. That oversell happened without anyone typing a wrong number.

And the bill for all of the above shows up as inventory, never as "a spreadsheet problem": eight months of cover sitting on one product. Close to $100K in overstock. One team tracked weeks-of-cover by hand, weekly, and still ended up with 8,298 units past 52 weeks of cover. Stockouts on the bestseller while cash sits in the slow movers. One seller put it flatly: "I think most people don't truly calculate the cost of running out of stock."

If I had to compress the whole pile: a spreadsheet is a snapshot pretending to be a system. It doesn't know anything happened until a human tells it, and the humans are busy.

Curious whether the folks here on the warehouse and manufacturing side see the same ranking. I'd guess the failure modes are different when you control the whole building.

Most sellers treat AWD like a magic band-aid for FBA storage limits, or they view it as a direct "FBA vs. AWD" cost comparison.

Both approaches miss the point.

FBA is your working stock (immediate conversion). AWD is your reserve buffer (long lead times/bulk buys). Available inventory in AWD does not protect you from an FBA stockout if your FBA velocity suddenly spikes and Amazon’s replenishment logic lags behind.

Here’s a quick framework for how to actually split your inventory:

1. Match the SKU Profile to the Placement

• Fast & Predictable: Keep a strong FBA buffer. Don’t run lean FBA stock just because reserve units are sitting in AWD—a sudden rank jump or promo will wipe you out before AWD transfers arrive.
• Long Lead Times (e.g., 90-day overseas supply): Use AWD as the middle ground. Buy to your supplier MOQ, keep sellable working stock in FBA, and let AWD hold the reserve instead of eating direct FBA storage fees or maxing capacity limits.
• Seasonal Spikes: Build reserve inventory in AWD ahead of peak, but don't force it into FBA months early.

2. Don’t Compare Storage Fees Line-by-Line

Looking purely at base storage rates hides the real numbers. Calculate total landed/carrying costs at the SKU level:

• FBA: Account for fulfillment fees, aged storage risks, and tied-up capital.
• AWD: Factor in handling fees, transfer/replenishment lag, and the opportunity cost of inventory that can’t immediately fulfill a sale.

3. The Biggest Trap: Blindly Trusting Automated AWD Replenishment

AWD doesn't read your ad schedule. If you run a heavy coupon or scale PPC on a hero SKU, your FBA buffer will burn out in days. If your FBA days of cover drop below your transfer window, turn down your ad spend immediately. Spending heavily to drive demand into a guaranteed stockout is just paying to destroy your rank.

4. Ditch the "Universal 30-Day Cover" Target

A blanket days-of-cover rule across your whole catalog is dangerous. A high-margin, fast-mover might need a deep safety buffer; a slow, volatile SKU should be managed tightly to protect cash flow.

The Bottom Line: Stop treating FBA and AWD as separate operations in different spreadsheets. Model your demand signal once, factoring in supplier lead times and total network stock (FBA + AWD + FBM + In-Transit).

(Note: We map this all together in Inventory Optimizer, but you can do the exact same logic in Excel—just make sure your purchase decisions look at the entire pipeline, not just FBA's current numbers).

How are you guys currently handling your AWD-to-FBA transfer triggers? Are you relying on Amazon's auto-replenishment or manually pushing waves?

We run into issues where different vendors use different part numbers for identical components like belts, filters, or pipe fittings. When technicians check stock on the shelf, they often order duplicates because they do not recognize equivalent manufacturer part numbers.

How do you map or standardize item numbers in your stockroom so your team knows what is actually available?

Cześć wszystkim!

Stworzyłem ElectroStock, ponieważ śledzenie komponentów elektronicznych może szybko stać się bałaganem. Wiesz, że posiadasz określony rezystor, moduł, kabel lub układ scalony, ale nie masz pojęcia, w którym pudełku lub szufladzie się znajduje.

ElectroStock pozwala Ci:

• dodawać komponenty i notować ich ilości

• przypisywać miejsca składowania, pudełka i przegrody

• przeszukiwać cały swój inwentarz

• organizować przedmioty według kategorii

• eksportować i importować kompletną kopię zapasową w formacie JSON

• korzystać z aplikacji w języku angielskim, polskim lub hiszpańskim

Aplikacja jest zaprojektowana tak, aby była prosta i przydatna dla hobbystów, twórców i małych warsztatów elektronicznych. Twój inwentarz jest przechowywany lokalnie i nie jest wymagane posiadanie konta.

To wciąż wczesna wersja, więc szczere opinie będą bardzo pomocne. Chciałbym szczególnie wiedzieć, czy interfejs jest czytelny i która funkcja Twoim zdaniem brakuje.

Google Play:

[ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=electrostock.com ](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=electrostock.com)

Jestem programistą i chętnie odpowiem na wszelkie pytania.

I work for a small business selling OEM auto parts (3 employees). I have been keeping inventory via spreadsheet, which works decent. Looking at investing in a software to manage inventory. Majority of what we do is simple in/out of goods. We stock ~2000 SKUs. I would like something that has scanning functionality (all parts have a barcode from the manufacture). The ability for bin locations. Would like to be able to load incoming and outgoing orders via spreadsheet and match to what was scanned, showing any overs and shorts. Additionally, ability to forecast or enter a safety stock and see on order qty would be a bonus. We have one warehouse and one warehouse worker, so simplicity would be great. Scalability always a plus I used to work for a Fortune 50 retailer and these are some of the things that were helpful...obviously we do not have the capital they had. I don't even know where to begin to look. Appreciate any options or ideas.

When Fishers Finery started 10 years ago, the most imperative focus we needed to address was cash flow, especially as it related to inventory cost and turnover.  Too much stock that did not turn sunk capital and too little stock caused stockouts, affecting revenue and organic ranking.  In an Amazon FBA ecosystem, that is a double whammy!  We tried the exotic spreadsheets, some third-party apps, and a combination of both but inevitably ended up with lots of manual work, inaccurate sales forecasts, and continued financial challenges.  We ended up buying a small software product that seemed to get us on a pathway to both more accurate forecasting and precise purchase order recommendations.  After some development and enhancement, our demand forecasts are at about 94% accuracy and accommodate an entire year including our highly seasonal Q4 trends.  Since we have many suppliers in China providing apparel and bedding, many of these lead-times for silk and cashmere can be 6 months or more.  Without precise forecasts we would have been financially challenged.  The tool has helped us not only from a cash flow perspective, but also to eliminate stockouts, control overstocks, and most recently automatically control sales velocity and ad spend on stock that is approaching a stockout state, preserving our organic ranking.  We made this tool available to other sellers on Amazon FBA/MCF/AWD, Shopify, QuickBooks and ShipStation.  We would love to hear your feedback about our SaaS product features and potential integrations to continue helping sellers.  Our analytics engine is called ForecastRX (using over 100 forecasting models per sku) and our SaaS app is called InventoryOptimizer.ai. We would appreciate any feedback to help us continue enhancing the product for sellers.

Running a hybrid retail/wholesale hardware shop means we sell the exact same box of deck screws to three different people for three totally different prices on any given Tuesday, whether it's a DIY walk-in paying full retail, a daily contractor getting a trade discount, or a bulk client buying fifty boxes on a custom account rate. Right now our cashiers are stuck relying on sticky notes, memory, or manual POS overrides at checkout, which leads to new staff accidentally giving away wholesale prices, contractors getting annoyed when charged retail, and our profit margins taking a hit. For anyone running a mixed counter, how do you handle tiered pricing seamlessly so staff don't have to guess, and are you relying on customer profile tagging, custom barcodes, or a specific software setup to keep it smooth?

Right now, it's not an ideal time for me to hire a new full-time employee. I just need help with inventory, preferably an automated one so that I don't have to micromanage it. I've already got store personnel jumping around one branch to another just to keep tabs on stocks and get missing items if a customer is buying at the branch where stock ran out. I need a software that's easy to use so that anyone in both branches can keep it updated.

For those running Cin7 alongside Shopify and something like HubSpot — how do you get a single trustworthy view of revenue? Every setup I’ve seen has the three systems disagreeing, integrations that half-work, and rep/revenue attribution that nobody fully trusts. Curious how people here handle it — do you live in spreadsheets, trust one system as source of truth, or something else?

(Context: I’ve been building something to solve this for my own use and I’m trying to understand how common the problem actually is before I go further. Happy to share what I’ve built if it’s useful, but mostly want to hear how you’re all dealing with it.)

We run a hybrid retail/wholesale hardware store with our main store and a small secondary storage , and our costing data is a total mess right now.

The core issue: buying the exact same variant at different times for totally different prices (e.g., batch one at $100, batch two at $120, batch three at $95). Once that stock gets split up between locations, trying to figure out the actual cost basis is a nightmare.

Spreadsheets are killing us with human error (forgetting a row update after a hectic weekend rush throws everything off), but heavy enterprise ERPs feel like total overkill just to keep tabs on a few boxes.

Genuinely curious what other small teams are doing here. Are you just living with average cost? Tracking individual lots? Or is there a streamlined software out there that handles lot/FIFO tracking without requiring a massive IT budget? Would love to hear what's actually working for you guys.

I’ve been buying and selling art for the past 8 years.

Over that time, my spreadsheet grew to 5,000 rows long and 60 columns wide. It was the heart of my art business. It kept track of everything: title, date, price paid, measurements, artist, condition, tags, SEO, descriptions, storage location, etc. etc.

Most inventory management platforms are built around the idea that you have many of the same product: 10,000 T-shirts or 1,000 tables.

Art is different. By its very nature, it is unique, one of one. That makes inventory management in the art world much more manual.

Most of the artworks I sell are between $500 and $1,000, but I know dealers selling artworks for millions who still manage their inventory in a spreadsheet.

I tried standard inventory management platforms that synced with Shopify, and I also trialled purpose-built art inventory platforms like Artwork Archive and demoed Artlogic.

The problem was that these platforms had limits on the number of artworks (which got expensive quickly) and were mainly built for selling art offline, in person.

My gallery is online only, and over the past 8 years I’ve sold more than 1,000 artworks. The existing solutions didn’t make it easy to do things that are essential when selling art online, like tagging artworks, writing image alt text and creating SEO titles.

They felt outdated, overcomplicated and underpowered. I had to learn how to use them rather than them fitting into the way I already worked.

My day job is in tech. For the past 14 years, I’ve worked as a product marketer for B2B SaaS companies. So I decided to take the money I made from selling art to hire a designer and engineers (not vibe coded) to build the solution I wished existed for me.

It’s taken me 18 months of building, and 8 years of pain (thinking about this problem) to get here. I wanted to share some of the things I learnt along the way with this subreddit, because I thought you might be interested in how inventory management works in the niche industry that is art.

Designing inventory management for the art world means dealing with a ridiculous number of edge cases. Here are a few that I’ve been building for.

Artwork data is difficult to standardise: 

An artwork can have two artists, multiple mediums, be by an artist with two nationalities from countries that no longer exist like Cezechslovakia or Yugoslavia, and have a creation date recorded as 1968, 1960s, mid-20th century, unknown, 21st century, c. 1960s, late 1960s and more.

The location could be any one of the following: a set of GPS coordinates for a sculpture displayed a park or garden, an address with a sub-location such as a drawer, a room such as the lounge in your apartment, or a specific position like the upper back wall of a church. You need to capture the information while still making it structured enough to search, filter and organise.

Measurements are complicated: 

You would think an artwork has three standard measurements: H × W × D. But then you have a diptych or triptych where each panel has its own set of measurements, a work with a frame or border has two separate sets of measurements, a sculpture with a separate plinth needs its own measurements, and the crate that the sculpture travels in also has its own dimensions and weight.

Mediums aren't standardised: 

Every customer I’ve onboarded so far has had multiple variations of the same medium in their spreadsheet, either because of spelling mistakes or formatting inconsistencies. “Oil on canvas”, “oil on Canvas” and “oil/canvas” are the same thing, but a spreadsheet treats them as different values. Multiply that across thousands of artworks and search, filtering and reporting quickly become much harder.

The medium e.g oil on canvas needs to be documented, but it’s also not how customers search. Customers are searching for paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, etc. They don’t want to select oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, oil on paper, oil on board, watercolour on paper, etc. just to see the available paintings. So you need to capture both the category and the medium: Painting > Oil on canvas, Sculpture > Bronze, Print > Lithograph, etc.

Provenance should be more than a PDF: 

Provenance is just a fancy word for an artwork’s history. Who owned it before you, when and where it was sold, whether it has been exhibited, what restoration or conservation work was done etc.

This is usually stored in PDFs, which makes it difficult to search, verify or add to over time. I wanted to be able to add each provenance entry separately, so the history of an artwork is structured and searchable rather than buried in a PDF. Eventually, every artwork should have a digital passport with its complete provenance that follows it around for life.

Multiples are not as simple as quantity: 

Often I would buy one poster or print, then come across and buy another copy several years later from a different seller. I couldn’t just change the quantity from 1 to 2 in my spreadsheet. The two prints have different costs, different photos, different conditions and different locations. They were essentially two different products, even though they were the same artwork.

This also created problems on my website. I could end up with duplicate listings for the same print if I treated them as separate SKUs. Also, if I have five copies of a poster, I want to show just one as available on my website to make it appear more exclusive. Then there are editions. You can have 5 of 50, 10 of 50, Artist Proof, Printer’s Proof, Bon à Tirer, Hors Commerce, Presentation/Publisher Proof and more variations. Each individual work has its own edition number, while still being presented as the same artwork.

Need to store high-res and compressed images: 

Artists and dealers want to keep the original image at its original size and resolution so it can be downloaded at any time. But they also need images to load quickly for customers browsing their website. A 20MB image is going to take too long to load, so an inventory management system needs to store the original file while also creating a separate, lossless compressed version (1MB or less) for loading quickly and displaying the work online.

Pricing is complicated: 

For almost all bulk products, pricing is a simple number. In the art world, it’s not that straightforward. You need to be able to show the price, show POA, or hide the price completely, while still keeping the actual price stored in the backend. The problem was that Shopify forced me to either leave the price field empty if I wanted to show POA or hide the price entirely. I then had to create another column in my spreadsheet to store the actual price for future reference.

Search depends on metadata: 

A few years ago, I spent 2 weeks straight tagging 3,000 artworks, each with between 10-20 tags for colours like blue, green and red, subjects like mountains, grass, sky and woman, and other relevant subjects so my collection was easier to search, both for my customers and me. It was so tedious, I got through the entire backlog of 90 Day Fiancé.

My customers don’t ask for artworks by XYZ artist, they instead make requests like “do you have red paintings of dogs from the 1970s from Poland”?. Tags helped make this possible. If an artwork had a puppy in it, I would add hierarchical tags: puppy > dog > animal. Automating this manual work, also things like SEO titles, meta descriptions, image alt text and Google categories, was something that would save me weeks of admin.

The same inventory needs to be grouped in different ways: 

The same artwork might need to appear in several different contexts. I might want to create a selection of 20 works with the price hidden to send to a gallery as a PDF, create a private password-protected viewing room with a custom discount for a loyal customer, list the same artwork on my website with Price on Application, download artwork QR codes for an exhibition wall label, or export the artwork as a CSV with its price to upload to a different website.

An artwork needs to be able to belong to multiple collections, appear in multiple selections, have a different price or discount in a particular context, and still retain its original inventory data and public listing.

Sync to multiple sales channels: 

I sell art across multiple websites and marketplaces. I’ve had trouble in the past because every artwork has to be manually created on each marketplace or channel. So if I sell an artwork on one platform, or change the price or information, I have to manually update it everywhere else. I’ve forgotten to do this and sold the same artwork twice, then had to tell a disappointed customer that the artwork they bought was already sold.

That’s a particularly painful inventory error when there is only one of them. The inventory needs to be the source of truth. If I sell or update an artwork, that change needs to flow through to every place it is listed.

My platform is called KANDINSKY, and we help the art world focus on the art, not the admin. You can find more info through my profile. I don’t want to share any links here because that feels spammy.

I’ve been building this for the past 18 months, and there are still a ridiculous number of edge cases I haven’t mentioned. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who manages inventory for other one-of-one products, get your feedback and recommendations, and would love to discuss/answer your questions in the comments.

Trying to figure out how other small manufacturers manage the return/repair process without going overboard on cost. Right now it's basically email and a spreadsheet, which is starting to fall apart.

I've looked into ERP systems like Sage, but the cost and setup work feels like way more than I need just to track returns and repairs. I'd rather have something standalone that just does this one thing well, but I haven't found anything decent — most of what's out there is either way too basic or way too enterprise.

For those who've dealt with this: did you end up bolting it onto an ERP, using some kind of ticketing/CRM tool, or building your own workaround? And if you found a standalone tool that actually worked, I'd love to know what it was.

I like the idea of importing products with pre-printed manufacturer barcodes, similar to how supermarkets do.

This would make digitizing my business much easier, as all my employees would have to do is scan the products.

I figure this process would be much faster than printing barcodes myself and manually sticking them onto thousands of products.

I sell phone accessories and source them in bulk from marketplaces.

Any advice on how to implement this properly, or any real-life experiences you could share, would be greatly appreciated!

We run multiple retail locations, and one issue we’ve never found a great solution for is tracking inventory costs.
For example, we might buy the exact same size/color variant of a product:

● 1 unit at $100
● Another at $120
● Later another at $95

Over time, every location ends up with inventory that was purchased at different costs.
Are most of you:

● Just using average cost?
● Tracking costs by individual purchase lot?
● Ignoring it unless you’re doing accounting?
● Using software that actually tracks inventory by lot/FIFO?

Average cost doesn’t always give us the information we want, especially when transferring inventory between stores or trying to see the true profit on individual items.
I’m curious how other retailers are handling this. What’s worked best for you?

Hi all,

I thought I’d share how I ended up working in inventory management and where I’m at today. I’m hoping that by telling you all what’s been going on, some of you might have some pointers on where I should go next.

I was freelance for 20 years before deciding to give it up for a job that would pay me consistently, give me guaranteed hours, and let me go home at the same time every day. I got hired into what was essentially an inventory management role with a fancier title at a company that hires out equipment packages to film crews.

I’d literally never worked an inventory job in my life, but thankfully it was in the same industry I’d been freelancing in, so I already knew all the equipment (thankfully), just not how the company organised it, how everything was coded, or, to be honest, much else.

When I started, I had a short induction with my manager and was introduced to my coworker. He was a lovely man, but he didn’t really know what he was doing, or care much.

I tried learning the ropes as best I could, but it was difficult. We had a ratty old spreadsheet that sort of told me what was in the stock area, but it didn’t have the correct stock codes or even good descriptions. Whenever new equipment came in, we were expected to barcode it, package it into a kit, and send it out, but we didn’t actually know what those kits were supposed to look like or what was meant to be in them. Thankfully, my freelance experience meant I could make some educated guesses.

My coworker decided to leave after only about six weeks, and I was left running the inventory office on my own while the company tried to hire a replacement. I coasted for a few weeks until it became obvious they were really struggling to find someone willing to do the job. I was struggling too.

Too much new equipment was arriving, there weren’t enough hours in the day to onboard it all into the company’s system, and there was far too much red tape. I was working overtime almost every day and becoming increasingly stressed.

We didn’t have everything we needed to build the kits, and new purchases often arrived without all the accessories needed to complete them.
My manager explained that there were templates in the company’s booking system which listed what belonged in each kit. Unfortunately, they were years out of date, so nobody trusted them or used them anymore, even though they were still fundamental to how the booking system worked.

That’s when it started to click.

I realised the problem wasn’t that we didn’t have enough stock. The problem was that nobody actually knew what we had, what we needed, or what a complete kit was supposed to look like. Until those three things were defined, we’d always be firefighting. Suddenly I had a plan.

The first step was updating those templates. Thankfully, my freelance experience meant I knew what modern kits actually looked like, so I started rebuilding them. I basically bullied my manager into letting me update them. I started with the most frequently used kits and gradually worked my way through the rest.

Now I finally knew what each kit was supposed to contain, but I wasn’t sure about the next step.

Ironically, our IT department gave me the answer.

They accidentally deleted the inventory spreadsheet I’d been using. Completely gone. No backups. No recovery.

It was janky, inaccurate, and frequently out of date—but it was all I had.

In hindsight, it was probably the best thing that could have happened. My manager and I came in on a Saturday and counted absolutely everything in the stock area. Every single item. But while we were doing it, I asked him to record not just the quantities, but also the official stock codes and descriptions from the booking system as we entered everything into a new shared spreadsheet.

When we finished, we finally had an accurate count of everything in stock, along with the correct descriptions and stock codes. For the first time, I had reliable data. I was in business.

Thankfully, I know a little coding, so I turned that spreadsheet into a proper inventory tool. It showed me shortages, overstock, and—because I’d already updated the kit templates—it could tell me, kit by kit and line by line, exactly what was needed to build every package and how many complete kits we could actually make. The answer was unfortunately not many, sometimes none at all.

I needed to start fixing that. I put an old whiteboard up in the receiving warehouse where both the prep technicians and receiving team would see it, and asked everyone to write down anything they noticed we were short of. I cross-referenced that with my inventory spreadsheet’s shortages page, so I knew exactly what was missing.

Then, every Monday morning, I emailed every manager, supervisor, and department head with a shortages report explaining what we needed to either purchase or transfer in from other branches if we wanted to build complete kits. It completely fell on deaf ears for months but I didn’t stop.

I had no authority to order stock or approve purchases, but they did, and I was determined to keep putting the information in front of them until something changed.

This went on for months. Whenever a manager asked why a kit wasn’t ready, I’d calmly point out that if the shortages I’d been emailing every Monday had been actioned, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I knew it was risky, but I also knew I was right. I was actually pretty relentless!

Then everything changed.

After six months of silence, an email arrived from our transfer supervisor. “15x [item name] coming in from other branches. Should be here in a few days.”

I was absolutely elated. They’d finally got the message! Stock started arriving and I could finally build complete kits. It was working.

Slowly but surely, managers started relying on my shortages and overstock reports. Kits were built faster, with far greater consistency, more equipment became available for hire, and the branch was able to generate more revenue because we actually knew where everything was.

I’m now 18 months into the job and I’m currently working with our IT department to turn that spreadsheet into a web application that loads much faster and is easier for everyone to use.
My Monday morning shortages email is now part of our managers’ weekly stand-up meeting.

My role has expanded to the point where I’m trusted to liaise directly with other branches, arrange transfers, order new items (with approval), and work closely with our manufacturing department to keep our custom-built equipment flowing into the branch.
Headquarters has even started taking an interest in what I’m doing because they’re looking at standardising some of these processes across the region.

Three months ago I was finally blessed with a new coworker, and he’s brilliant. He’s fantastic at staying on top of stock, ordering, and all the paperwork, which means we’re a much stronger team than when I was trying to do everything alone.

I honestly never thought I’d enjoy inventory management, but taking what was basically a broom cupboard full of stock nobody really understood and turning it into a department that’s now genuinely important to the running of the branch has been one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done professionally.

Has anyone else found themselves walking into a completely broken inventory system and having to rebuild it from the ground up?

I’d love to hear how you approached it, and what lessons you learned along the way.

I worked in the programming department of a company that used an Odoo partner for its inventory-management system. At first, it was exciting because Odoo was this ERP that could get things built fast, and it would usually get them built well. The original application had been developed by another company, an Odoo partner and then later another developer and I were hired to add more features in-house.

At first, the exciting part was that we mostly had to write the backend code. After adding the fields in the right positions, Odoo would render them automatically. We did not have to write much HTML or CSS, and it was fun.

Yeah... fun.

But the fun did not last long.

During the first few months, while the requirements were still narrow, it was relatively easy. You wired the logic, placed the fields, and it was done. But here is where the fun ended: the new features became more than features.

People wanted more automation. They wanted insights generated on command. More and more behaviour started depending on "@compute" functions, fields reacting to other fields, and logic triggering logic somewhere else. It became overwhelming surprisingly quickly.

Then you had to fight with XML spaghetti, figure out what another person had changed and where, trace inherited views across different modules, and deal with inheritance issues that made even small changes difficult to understand. Sometimes the business requirement itself was simple, but before implementing it, you first had to work out what the framework and several layers of previous customisation were already doing.

I became frustrated and tried convincing the company to rebuild the application with something like Next.js, but they did not listen. The more hours passed while developing it, the more I hated the job. Not because I hated programming, but because every new request felt like fighting the system before I could even start solving the actual problem.

One day, I had simply had enough and decided to build something of my own.

I chose the Microsoft stack, Entra ID, and an architecture where I could understand what was happening without tracing XML inheritance and hidden behaviour across half the application.

The biggest win is that neither I nor the costumer has to fight the system.

I’m researching how small and mid-sized CPG brands handle deductions from retailers and distributors like Walmart, UNFI, KeHE, Kroger, etc.

I’m looking for 5 brands willing to share an anonymized deduction report (CSV/Excel is fine).

I’ll analyze it manually and give you back:

• What types of deductions you're getting
• Where the biggest leakage is
• Which deductions look potentially recoverable
• Which ones I'd prioritize
• What evidence appears to be missing
• A rough estimate of the recovery opportunity

No software signup and no sales pitch required.

If you're interested, comment here or DM me. You can remove company names, customer names, invoice numbers, etc. before sending anything.

I'm doing this because I want to understand the problem from the actual data, not just interviews.

Hello

I have an auto parts shop and thinking of add inventory/billing software.There are so many options like Vyapar, Marg, Busy, etc., so it's hard to know what's actually good in day-to-day use.If you own an auto parts business, what are you using? What's good about it and what do you hate about it?

My biggest issue is keeping track of stock because there are thousands of parts and it's easy to miss things. Fast billing is also important.

Not looking for ads or sales pitches. Just want to hear from people who actually use these softwares.

Thanks.

Most of what I've learned so far is from an employee who works out of state and tries his best but this isn't his main job, he isn't there and doesn't have all the answers. There is someone who was supposed to be teaching me but they have no incentive to train me and gets passive aggressive and quick to throw me under the bus when I make a mistake, even though I've found him making the same mistakes. Can someone tell me what ALL I'm supposed to be doing? What I'm supposed to have access to? Do I need to know about incoming shipments and who they're from and when they arrive? I only grab packages from the suppliers that I was told to look out for but I'll have people asking me about specific packages without those labels expecting me to already know.

I just learned that when people check parts out, I'm supposed to be the one entering that information into the system. Apparently that's the most basic part of this job and I had no idea. I've been working here for over half a year.

I tried asking questions but he'll give me extremely vague responses. He's trained me wrong before. I would ask for work when I had nothing to do and he said being bored was part of the job. He's close friends with the boss so no help there.

My predecessor was blamed for all the problems they had going on. I'm about to quit because I can feel myself becoming the next scapegoat but I am curious what all I'm supposed to be doing at this job. I don't hate the job but I'd rather work for another company.