Microsoft Excel is a wonderful tool that many of us in the business world use on a daily basis. It helps us build charts and organize data into rows and columns for easy retrieval later. However, Excel isn’t the ideal solution for every business need. It’s a step up from managing your inventory on paper, of course, but it’s a far cry from an automated system.
Excel’s inventory management deficiencies are:
- It’s difficult to set up and you have to know inventory management very well to know what to include.
- It’s difficult to maintain because you have to enter all the information by hand.
- Data entry by hand can lead to typos and other serious errors.
- There are no instruction manuals, so if the person who set up your inventory management spreadsheets ever leaves, you’ll be in trouble trying to replace them.
- Inventory management gets more complicated as a company grows, and Excel simply can’t keep up.