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u/mxzgitm

▲ 0 r/InventoryManagement

Spent 3 weeks trying to ditch spreadsheets — here's what I learned comparing Google Sheets, Zoho Inventory and Odoo (and Moulmall a tool I'm building)

Quick disclosure up front so I don't get banned: I'm building one of the tools below (MoulMall). I'll mark it clearly when I get to it and I'll give you the real trade-offs, not a sales pitch. Mods, feel free to nuke if this isn't allowed — but I think the comparison part is genuinely useful regardless of which tool anyone picks.

Context: My wife is running a small clothing business and was managing ~300 SKUs across many locations in one country, all on Google Sheets. It worked until it becomes overwelmed as a tool: overselling stuff, wrong stock counts after returns, no team management, no clue what the actual margins are. Spent about 3 weeks trialing the obvious options before building my own. Here's the honest breakdown.

1. Google Sheets / Excel

What people don't admit: for under ~50 SKUs and one location, it's genuinely fine. Free. Flexible. Everyone on your team already knows it.

Where it breaks:

  • No real-time sync between people (yes, Sheets has it, no, it doesn't work when 3 people are editing at once)
  • No automatic stock deduction when you invoice
  • "Low stock alerts" = a conditional format you'll ignore
  • Multi-location = a different tab and a lot of crying
  • Reporting = whatever pivot table you can build at 11pm

Cost: $0, but the hidden cost is the hours you lose reconciling and the orders you lose to stock-outs.

2. Zoho Inventory

Free plan is real (1 user, ~50 orders/month, 2 locations). Paid plans start around $29/mo (Standard, annual billing) and go up to $249/mo (Enterprise).

Pros:

  • Mature product, lots of features
  • Integrates with the rest of the Zoho ecosystem (Books, CRM)
  • Good for multi-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, Shopify)

Cons:

  • The free plan limit is orders per month, not products. If you process more than 50 orders, you're paying.
  • User seats are expensive: Standard and Pro only include 2 users. Need a 3rd person? Extra ~$7.50/user/month.
  • UI is dense. Onboarding a non-technical employee takes real time.
  • If you're not already in the Zoho universe, the integrations matter less than they sound.

3. Odoo

The "free" plan is one app only. The moment you install a second module (say, Inventory + Invoicing), you're on the Standard plan. In the US that's ~$24.90/user/month annual. In Europe/MENA it's cheaper. Custom plan jumps to ~$37–47/user/month.

Pros:

  • Insanely powerful. If you can configure it, it does basically anything.
  • Community edition is genuinely free if you self-host (and have technical skills)
  • One platform for accounting, inventory, CRM, manufacturing, HR

Cons:

  • Per-user pricing kills small teams. 5 users on Standard = ~$125/mo just for licenses, before any implementation work.
  • Setup is not a weekend project. Most SMBs end up paying an Odoo partner $3k–$10k+ to implement.
  • It's an ERP. Treating it like "just inventory software" misses what it actually is, and you'll be overwhelmed.

4. MoulMall — what I'm building ⚠️ this is my product, biased section

Built it because Zoho felt over-engineered for a 2-person shop and Odoo felt like buying a tractor to mow the lawn. Free plan (1 user, 10 products, unlimited orders), then $19/mo Starter (5 users, 500 products), $49/mo Growth (20 users, 5,000 products, multi-warehouse).

Honest about where it's worse:

  • Way fewer integrations than Zoho. No Shopify/Amazon connector yet.
  • No manufacturing/MRP module. If you actually make things, Odoo is the answer.
  • It's new. Zoho has 10+ years of edge cases solved that I haven't hit yet.
  • No mobile app (only mobile web), Zoho has one.

Where I think it's better for some people:

  • Pricing scales by product count, not per-user. 5 or 20 users costs the same at the tier.
  • Free plan is forever-free, not a 14-day trick.
  • Setup is genuinely minutes, not weeks.

URL is in my profile so I'm not link-spamming the post.

TL;DR — my honest recommendation regardless of what you pick:

  • Under 50 SKUs, one person: Sheets is fine, don't overthink it
  • You're in the Zoho ecosystem already: Zoho Inventory
  • You need full ERP (accounting + inventory + manufacturing) and have budget for setup: Odoo
  • You're a small/mid team that just needs clean inventory + invoicing without the bloat: try something lighter (mine, inFlow, Sortly, whatever fits)

Happy to answer questions on any of the four. What are you all currently using and what made you pick it?

reddit.com
u/mxzgitm — 5 days ago
▲ 1 r/buildinpublic

I'm building inventory software because my wife was losing money on a clothing shop and I couldn't watch it anymore

Building MoulMall — inventory, orders and invoicing for small shops. Wanted to share the origin because I think a lot of founders here build for imaginary users, and I want to be honest that I'm building for one very real one who happens to live in my house.

The setup

My wife runs a clothing business. ~300 SKUs across sizes and colors, which sounds small until you realize it's actually closer to ~50 styles × variants. She started on Google Sheets. Outgrew it. Moved to Airtable. Outgrew that too. Both times the "outgrowing" wasn't a sudden cliff — it was three problems that compounded until the business was hemorrhaging money in ways neither of us could see clearly.

The three problems that made me start coding

1. Team coordination was chaos. Two people working the shop, one person doing online orders, occasional help during sales. Everyone was editing the same sheet, overwriting each other, or — worse — not editing it because they'd given up. Stock counts were a fiction by Friday. We'd promise customers items we didn't have. We'd find items in the back we didn't know we had.

2. Manual calculations were quietly wrong. Margins, discounts, supplier costs, returns — every formula in the sheet had been duct-taped over the previous one. When I actually audited it I found a column that had been silently calculating margin on pre-tax revenue for ~4 months. We were less profitable than she thought. By a meaningful amount.

3. No forecasting, no signal. "What sold last month" required 30 minutes of pivot tables. "What should I reorder" was vibes. She was reordering items that had stopped selling and running out of the ones that were moving. The data existed. It was just locked inside a spreadsheet nobody had time to interrogate.

Why I didn't just use existing tools

I tried. Spent a weekend evaluating with her in the room (which I recommend — watching a non-technical user fail at "easy" software is humbling).

  • Zoho Inventory — Genuinely good product. But Standard is $29/mo for 2 users, and we'd need 3-4. Onboarding her took 40+ minutes before her first invoice. She said "I'd rather use Sheets." That was the verdict.
  • Odoo — Powerful, and the per-user pricing was a non-starter for a small shop. Also: it's an ERP. She doesn't need an ERP. She needs the inventory app of an ERP, but Odoo doesn't really sell it that way once you need more than one module.
  • Airtable — Where we already were. Beautiful tool, wrong shape. We were building a half-broken app inside it instead of using software designed for the job.

The gap I kept seeing: nothing was built for a small shop where the owner is the ops person, the salesperson, and the accountant. Everything assumed someone, somewhere, had time to configure.

What I'm actually building

The shape it's taking:

  • Free tier that's actually usable (not a 14-day trick) so small shops can start without a credit card
  • Pricing by product count and tier, not per-user — because making her pay extra to add her sister to the account was insane
  • Setup measured in minutes. The non-negotiable test: she can onboard a new helper in under 5 minutes without me in the room.
  • Forecasting and reorder suggestions baked in, not a $99/mo add-on
  • Multi-language from day one (she serves Arabic, French and English customers, and I refuse to ship a tool that ignores any of them)

The honest status

She uses it daily. That's the metric I care about right now. She's my main user, my main tester, and the person whose complaints I take most seriously. When she says "this button is in the wrong place," it gets moved that night.

I'm deliberately not sharing signup numbers yet — they're early, and posting them would feel performative. I'd rather come back in 3 months with retention numbers that mean something than post acquisition numbers that don't.

What I'd love feedback on

A few things I've been chewing on:

  1. The wife problem. Building for your spouse is the best UX feedback loop in the world and the worst sample size. Anyone else here built primarily for one user they know well? How did you know when to start listening to other users more than the original one?
  2. Forecasting for small shops. Most "AI inventory forecasting" is built for warehouses with 50k+ SKUs and years of clean data. For a 300-SKU shop with 18 months of messy data, what actually works? Moving averages? Seasonal decomposition? Just showing the trend and letting the human decide? I keep going back and forth.
  3. Saying no to features. Every shop owner she talks to has a different "must-have." If I built them all, I become Zoho with a smaller team. How do you decide what to refuse?

Product is at moulmall.com if you're curious. But honestly I'm here for the conversation. This sub has taught me more in 6 months than any podcast.

u/mxzgitm — 6 days ago
▲ 0 r/smallbusiness

Spent 3 weeks trying to ditch spreadsheets — here's what I learned comparing Google Sheets, Zoho Inventory and Odoo (and Moulmall a tool I'm building)

Quick disclosure up front so I don't get banned: I'm building one of the tools below (MoulMall). I'll mark it clearly when I get to it and I'll give you the real trade-offs, not a sales pitch. Mods, feel free to nuke if this isn't allowed — but I think the comparison part is genuinely useful regardless of which tool anyone picks.

Context: My wife is running a small clothing business and was managing ~300 SKUs across many locations in one country, all on Google Sheets. It worked until it becomes overwelmed as a tool: overselling stuff, wrong stock counts after returns, no team management, no clue what the actual margins are. Spent about 3 weeks trialing the obvious options before building my own. Here's the honest breakdown.

1. Google Sheets / Excel

What people don't admit: for under ~50 SKUs and one location, it's genuinely fine. Free. Flexible. Everyone on your team already knows it.

Where it breaks:

  • No real-time sync between people (yes, Sheets has it, no, it doesn't work when 3 people are editing at once)
  • No automatic stock deduction when you invoice
  • "Low stock alerts" = a conditional format you'll ignore
  • Multi-location = a different tab and a lot of crying
  • Reporting = whatever pivot table you can build at 11pm

Cost: $0, but the hidden cost is the hours you lose reconciling and the orders you lose to stock-outs.

2. Zoho Inventory

Free plan is real (1 user, ~50 orders/month, 2 locations). Paid plans start around $29/mo (Standard, annual billing) and go up to $249/mo (Enterprise).

Pros:

  • Mature product, lots of features
  • Integrates with the rest of the Zoho ecosystem (Books, CRM)
  • Good for multi-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, Shopify)

Cons:

  • The free plan limit is orders per month, not products. If you process more than 50 orders, you're paying.
  • User seats are expensive: Standard and Pro only include 2 users. Need a 3rd person? Extra ~$7.50/user/month.
  • UI is dense. Onboarding a non-technical employee takes real time.
  • If you're not already in the Zoho universe, the integrations matter less than they sound.

3. Odoo

The "free" plan is one app only. The moment you install a second module (say, Inventory + Invoicing), you're on the Standard plan. In the US that's ~$24.90/user/month annual. In Europe/MENA it's cheaper. Custom plan jumps to ~$37–47/user/month.

Pros:

  • Insanely powerful. If you can configure it, it does basically anything.
  • Community edition is genuinely free if you self-host (and have technical skills)
  • One platform for accounting, inventory, CRM, manufacturing, HR

Cons:

  • Per-user pricing kills small teams. 5 users on Standard = ~$125/mo just for licenses, before any implementation work.
  • Setup is not a weekend project. Most SMBs end up paying an Odoo partner $3k–$10k+ to implement.
  • It's an ERP. Treating it like "just inventory software" misses what it actually is, and you'll be overwhelmed.

4. MoulMall — what I'm building ⚠️ this is my product, biased section

Built it because Zoho felt over-engineered for a 2-person shop and Odoo felt like buying a tractor to mow the lawn. Free plan (1 user, 10 products, unlimited orders), then $19/mo Starter (5 users, 500 products), $49/mo Growth (20 users, 5,000 products, multi-warehouse).

Honest about where it's worse:

  • Way fewer integrations than Zoho. No Shopify/Amazon connector yet.
  • No manufacturing/MRP module. If you actually make things, Odoo is the answer.
  • It's new. Zoho has 10+ years of edge cases solved that I haven't hit yet.
  • No mobile app (only mobile web), Zoho has one.

Where I think it's better for some people:

  • Pricing scales by product count, not per-user. 5 or 20 users costs the same at the tier.
  • Free plan is forever-free, not a 14-day trick.
  • Setup is genuinely minutes, not weeks.

URL is in my profile so I'm not link-spamming the post.

TL;DR — my honest recommendation regardless of what you pick:

  • Under 50 SKUs, one person: Sheets is fine, don't overthink it
  • You're in the Zoho ecosystem already: Zoho Inventory
  • You need full ERP (accounting + inventory + manufacturing) and have budget for setup: Odoo
  • You're a small/mid team that just needs clean inventory + invoicing without the bloat: try something lighter (mine, inFlow, Sortly, whatever fits)

Happy to answer questions on any of the four. What are you all currently using and what made you pick it?

reddit.com
u/mxzgitm — 6 days ago