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Excel is not the problem. The count is.
Almost every small shop starts in a spreadsheet, and many should stay there longer than the software industry admits. This page is about the moment the spreadsheet stops being enough — and what to do on that day.
The short answer
Use a spreadsheet while one person owns the stock, the catalogue is small, and a count is a rare event. Move to an app when two people touch the same stock in the same week, when a count has to happen on a phone in a stockroom, or when you cannot answer "who changed this number, and when?" without opening a file's version history.
What a spreadsheet does well
- It is already there. No signup, no import, no training.
- It is flexible. Any column you want, any formula, any report you can write.
- It is yours. The file opens on any computer, forever, with or without a subscription.
- It is cheap. Free at the basic level; a Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace plan if you already pay for one.
- It is auditable in principle. Every cell is visible, and formulas can be reviewed.
None of that is a consolation prize. A well-built sheet with a locked formula column, a dated copy per count and one careful owner is a legitimate inventory system for a shop under a few hundred SKUs.
Where a spreadsheet loses a stock count
The failures are not about Excel's capability. They are about what happens when a count is done by tired people on a phone at the end of a Sunday.
1. The expected number is visible
A count sheet that shows the book quantity invites confirmation. People type what they expect to see, especially on the twentieth line. The fix in a spreadsheet is to hide the column, print a blank sheet, and reconcile afterwards — a process that survives only while someone enforces it.
2. A blank cell becomes zero
If the counted column is blank because you could not reach the top shelf, a SUM or a subtraction treats it as zero unless the formula checks. The common pattern is=IF(D2="",B2,D2) — keep the book quantity when the count is blank — and the common failure is that nobody wrote it, or someone dragged the formula over it.
3. The same count is entered twice
Two people count two halves, or one person submits from the phone and again from the laptop. In a spreadsheet the second entry is another row, and the stock is now wrong by the whole count. There is no id on a row that says "this is the same count".
4. The file forks
stock-march-final.xlsx, stock-march-final-v2.xlsx, a copy on the shop laptop and one in an email. Two people edit different copies on the same evening. Nobody can say which one is true, and the formula that references another sheet breaks silently when a tab is renamed.
5. There is no ledger
A spreadsheet stores the current number. It does not store the movements that made it: the delivery that was never entered, the sale someone forgot, the breakage nobody wrote down. When the count disagrees with the book, you cannot trace which event was missing, so the correction becomes an unexplained adjustment — and next month the same gap appears.
6. The phone is a second-class citizen
Excel on a phone is a viewer with a keyboard. Scanning a barcode into a cell is possible with an add-in or a Bluetooth scanner in keyboard mode, but the flow is not built for one hand in a dim stockroom, and offline editing across devices invites conflicts.
What the app changes, concretely
| Job | Spreadsheet | Mobile Inventory |
|---|---|---|
| Hide the expected quantity | A process, enforced by a person | The default; revealed at review |
| Uncounted lines | A formula you must get right | Keeps current stock; the review says so |
| Two people, one count | Two rows, manual merge | One count, one submit; a retry is a duplicate (multi-counter sheets are not built yet) |
| Who changed what | Version history at best | Every movement names actor, device and time |
| Delivery on the floor | Type it later from memory | Scan and receive in the aisle, offline if needed |
| Reorder | A formula per row, or eyeballing | Minimum per item; suggested top-up = 2×minimum − on hand |
| Import a supplier file | Paste and clean by hand | CSV/XLSX import with a rejected-row preview |
| Leaving | Save as | CSV, XLSX and JSON export on every plan |
| Price | Free to ~$10/month | $19/month, or $15 annual; 14-day trial, no card on the web |
When the spreadsheet is still the right answer
Stay with the sheet if one person owns stock, you count twice a year, your catalogue is under about 200 lines, and no one else needs to write to it. A shop that buys a case of something once a month and sells it over the counter does not have an inventory problem; it has a notebook.
The signal to move is not size. It is concurrency: two people changing stock, a count that must happen where the stock is, or a number you cannot explain. When those appear, the spreadsheet has stopped being cheap — the cost has moved into the hours spent reconciling it.
Moving without losing the history
- Save the current sheet as a dated copy and keep it. It is your audit trail for everything before the move.
- Clean the columns you will import: at minimum a name and a SKU per row. Remove merged cells and totals rows.
- Open the web trial, import the file, and read the rejected-row preview before committing.
- Count one location blind to set the opening quantities, rather than trusting the sheet's number.
- Set minimums on the twenty items you reorder most often.
- Export the result as XLSX once, and keep it beside the old sheet.
Re-importing the same file later updates items and does not add the opening quantity twice, so a cleaned sheet stays useful as a bulk-edit tool rather than a rival system.
What Mobile Inventory does not replace
It is not a spreadsheet. There is no arbitrary formula column, no pivot table, no free-form report builder. If your sheet does real analysis — margins by supplier, a custom reorder model, a seasonal forecast — keep doing that in Excel and export the data into it. Our job is the count and the ledger; analysis belongs in the tool that does analysis well.
The honest verdict
A spreadsheet is not a straw man; it is the most-used inventory system in the world for good reasons. It fails at a specific moment, and that moment is recognisable: the first time two people change stock in the same week, or the first count done on a phone in a stockroom. Until then, keep the sheet. After it, the app pays for itself in the first count that does not need reconciling twice.
Mobile Inventory's prices are published on the pricing page. Spreadsheet software is priced by its own vendor; there is no affiliate relationship on this page and no vendor was contacted.