r/InventoryManagement

I am from a medium sized icecream manufacturing company based in india and we have around 5 employees who keeps track of accounts using tally ( old school, yes). I am looking for some solutions that can help us out with inventory management, product management, sales forecasting ( maybe like a dashboard of which sku were popular, dealer management, freezer management ( like the addresses of the freezer and when they were shipped), maybe employee payroll if possible. To conclude, need an all in one tool where I can have the ability to retrieve any kind of data that is possible through 1 system. I was thinking about zoho, odoo , erp next. We dont want to spend on sap as it will be too much of a cost for us to bear atm. The final requirement is this tool should also support order scaling( like if the organization grows)

We even thought of developing our own custom erp solution but to me it looks like it might work well during the start, but as we go on scaling up, we might break a lot of things so developing a custom one i think is useless atm.

Please recommend the tools that are suitable for this and the duration that you might think will take to migrate from tally to this solution and how much budget is initially needed for software licensing and maybe hiring a partner to help us to migrate first.

Thanks!

I am curious how different engineers, workshops, and small manufacturing teams organize components across drawers, cabinets, and bins.

Some questions I have:

• Do you use spreadsheets or inventory software?
• How do you track quantities?
• How do you label your drawers and storage locations?
• Do you use printed labels, handwritten labels, QR codes, or barcodes?
• How do you search for parts quickly?
• How do you handle low stock alerts?
• Do multiple people access the same inventory?
• What problems or frustrations do you face with your current setup?

I would really like to understand real workflows and pain points people experience when managing hardware inventory and physical storage systems.

If you can take a photo of a shelf and give it to AI then your inventory problems are solved! Right?

Bro, there is no bigger lie in a warehouse.
The screen swears there’s stock. You check the bin bone dry. You check the top racks nothing. Now you’re playing detective looking for a phantom pallet that probably got mislabeled two years ago, while management is stressing about cycle counts.
Honestly, if ghost inventory could talk, it’d tell you it’s hiding behind the broken forklift .
Who else is fighting for their life against the system today? Is it a lazy CSV. upload, a skipped barcode scan, or just straight up black magic?
Let me know your worst ghost stock stories below, because right now, I'm ready to fight the computer screen.

I keep seeing the same inventory problems everywhere (like delayed sync, messy returns, mismatched bins) even in companies using “modern” systems.

At this point I’m wondering if it’s actually a tech issue or just how processes are set up internally.

What’s the #1 thing that still breaks inventory accuracy in your experience?

We are doing mid 8 figures on Shopify and inventory is starting to become one of the bigger bottlenecks.

We have multiple warehouse locations, one 3PL, some wholesale, light marketplace volume, and around 2k SKUs. Bundles and kits are where things get messy, especially when components are shared across products or sitting in transfers.

For anyone using Fulfil with Shopify at this scale, how well does it handle multi location stock, bundles, purchase orders, routing, and 3PL visibility once volume gets high?

I run a shop that has two locations in two states, we currently use square pos in stores for inventory and checkout. We have a Shopify website, I want to sync only select items from 1 shop to sell on the Shopify site, what is the best app on the Shopify App Store that I can easily choose select items from only one of the locations squares to appear on the Shopify website? I see Skuharmony, dpl, zon square. I just want the easiest way to choose maybe 50 items out of an inventory of 2k+ items to sell on the Shopify site. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Hello everyone!
I work at a wholesale distribution company that has like $250M annual revenue and 2 large warehouses.
My manager thinks that inventory is under control. That’s because our cycle counts have 98% accuracy and ERP reports look clean.
But if you are in the real operations, everything is much more different. Warehouse workers often can’t find the items that are needed. Some SKUs show as available in the system but are missing physically. Sometimes we find those items after a couple of days in another location.
The worst part is that my boss reports incorrect data and I need to tell him that. How can I explain that reports aren’t that accurate and what should I propose to fix?

I keep seeing the same issue in spare parts inventory one site rush-orders a part while the exact same item is just sitting unused at another branch. For teams managing multiple warehouses, plants, or service locations, what actually helps prevent this?

Do you rely on shared visibility across sites, internal transfers before purchasing, barcode scanning, standardized OEM/part naming, or min/max levels per location? Curious about real workflows that work in practice.

I've spent the last few months talking to Shopify merchants who manage their own warehouse — mostly 1–10 person operations, 50–500 SKUs, shipping physical products.

I went into this thinking the biggest inventory problem would be overselling. It's not. Here's what actually showed up most:

1. The Monday morning reconciliation ritual - Inventory manual recounts

Almost every merchant I spoke to spends 2–4 hours every Monday cross-referencing Shopify's numbers against what's actually on the shelf. Export orders. Cross-check pick lists. Find phantom stock. Adjust. Repeat.

At a conservative $40/hour for owner time, that's $8,000–16,000/year spent on a task that exists only because the system doesn't track movements accurately enough.

2. Bundle decomposition

Shopify handles bundles at the bundle level — it subtracts 1 bundle. But it doesn't automatically subtract the 3 component SKUs from the shelf. The shelf count stays wrong until someone manually reconciles it. Every. Single. Time.

3. Returns re-entry

A customer returns an item. Shopify adds it back to available inventory. But the item goes to a returns inspection area, not back to the pick shelf. Now Shopify says you have 12, the pick shelf has 11, and the returns bin has 1. The next order goes out fine — but the next next order causes a scramble.

4. No root cause tracing

When the count is wrong, there's no way to replay what happened. Shopify stores the current number, not the sequence of events that led to it. So you adjust, move on, and the same error happens again next week from the same structural cause.

The pattern that surprised me most: merchants had normalized these problems. Monday reconciliation was just "part of the job." They didn't think of it as a solvable problem. They thought of it as the cost of doing business.

It's not. Every one of these has a structural fix. Some are tool-level (event-based tracking instead of snapshot-based). Some are process-level (scan-in returns before marking available). But none of them require enterprise software.

Anyone else running a small warehouse and dealing with these? Curious what your biggest inventory headache is.

We work with a lot of construction and field service companies and keep running into the same problem nobody seems to have a clean solution for.

Materials go out to a job site. Job finishes. Some materials come back unused. And then what?

From what we have seen it usually goes one of a few ways; the crew drops it in a bin, someone manually counts it later, maybe it gets entered into a spreadsheet, or it just disappears into the warehouse and shows up as ghost inventory six months later. Meanwhile the accounting team has no idea what the actual net material cost of that job was after accounting for what came back.

Curious how other construction and field service businesses handle this. A few specific questions:

•	Do you have a system for logging what comes back and from which job?

•	Does your accounting software ever reflect the true net material cost of a job after returns?

•	Is this actually a big enough pain that you would pay for a simple mobile solution to fix it?

Not pitching anything here, genuinely trying to understand if this is a universal problem or just the companies we happen to talk to. Would love to hear how you handle it in the comments.

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?

Any flooring company here that has their inventory management process streamlined? What do you guys use?

Our process goes like this:

Inventory PO

- We order from suppliers

- Order comes in

- We update our inventory

Jobs

- Products are assigned to jobs (quantities, units, etc)

- Products assigned are subtracted from inventory

- Products go out of the warehouse

- Once job is done, products that are left/unused gets returned to the warehouse

- Inventory is updated

Issue / Blockers

- Some items come in kits/bags/bundles/boxes with ratios (Part A - Part B; 2:1, 1:1, etc)

- We use the items in the kits/bags/boxes/bundles separately depending on how big the job is

- Some items come in a different unit (e.g. gallons, lbs, etc) but we use it on jobs as different units (oz, etc)

Presently books have their barcodes on their back cover and magazines have their barcodes on the front cover.  The way books are arranged in shelves in libraries, scanning of books for inventorying is extremely difficult. If they print books' and magazines' barcodes vertically - extending from front through spine to back, books and magazines can be identified by scanning from any of the three faces, and it can simplify scanning of books arranged in shelves in libraries.

Between OEM, aftermarket swaps, and superseded numbers, things get messy fast. In most shops, it feels like all that knowledge lives in one person’s head.

Are you tracking aliases in your DMS, or is it still spreadsheets and memory? How are you managing core shelves so parts don’t vanish once they leave the counter?

I’m curious what’s actually working to keep things organized without losing your mind.

I’m looking to get a scannable inventory tracker app for the company i work at. it needs to be able to be utilized on both apple and android and it needs to have to ability to adjust locations of inventory as we have multiple warehouses and also have a few external contractors who do work on our inventory any suggestions?

I'm doing a consulting gig in another state. One of the items I'm looking at is the bar inventory program. I've discovered that there's a fairly large discrepancy between the set catalog prices of the liquor items, and the actual price being paid, due to case discounts, or even multiple bottle purchases. As I've been going through months of invoices, I've seen prices fluctuate widely from week to week.

So, the question is, what should I set the bottle price at, on the inventory program? The pre-discounted catalog price? The most recent post-discount price I can find per invoice?

I realize the % per shot won't be affected hugely, but over an entire 200+ item inventory, the swing between a pre-discount inventory cost and a post-discount inventory count could be quite large.

Thoughts?

I need to know if Service Titan is great for managing inventory. My company is debating on switching to it because we have more room in the budget now, and in my case, I would be using it to track inventory. We use service fusion right now and we debating on upgrading our plan and introducing a third party inventory software. Depending on the price increase in either scenario, would anybody absolutely vouch for Service Titan??

Every business has “that one uncle” who remembers all stock mentally and trusts memory more than software.

Most paid inventory tools are solving the wrong problem the moment you start ordering from Chinese factories. The entire logic these platforms run on assumes your supplier is a few days away and your reorder window is measured in weeks, not months. When you are working with 60+ day lead times that include production time, that core assumption falls apart before you even touch a setting.

The specific failure point most brands hit is the PO status problem. Your software logs a purchase order as "on order" the moment it gets sent, but nothing is being manufactured yet. Raw materials may not even be purchased on the factory side. The lead time clock your tool is counting down from starts in the wrong place entirely, and by the time the system sends a reorder signal you are already behind by the full production window. That is not a configuration issue, it is a fundamental mismatch between how these tools model supply chains and how China sourcing actually works.

Demand forecasting breaks in the same way. The algorithms pulling historical velocity data and projecting forward work fine for a warehouse 3 days away. For a factory in Guangdong where your goods need 30 days to produce and another 30 to ship, a signal firing when you have 2 weeks of stock left is useless. You needed it 10 weeks ago. The tools that let you manually override lead time settings help a little but they still depend on you having accurate upstream data, and most brands doing China sourcing for the first time do not have that.

The bigger gap that no inventory software solves is what actually happens after a PO hits a factory floor. Production delays, material substitutions, QC failures mid-run, those events stay completely invisible inside any platform until a shipping confirmation arrives or boxes show up at your 3PL and you open them. That window is where most costly surprises live.

After working through a few different setups, here is where the main options actually land for brands doing overseas bulk ordering.

Kanary solutions addresses the upstream problem that inventory software is not built to touch. Production monitoring, factory-side QC, and visibility into what is happening during the manufacturing window means you get early signals before a problem becomes a 90-day stock hole. The value sits before any inventory tool gets involved.

Day one fulfillment covers the warehousing and fulfillment leg cleanly once production closes. For brands that have sourcing handled and want reliable domestic storage with straightforward inventory syncing, it does that specific job without adding unnecessary complexity.

Best fulfill handles the combined sourcing and fulfillment workflow for brands that want fewer vendors to manage. Worth noting the pricing model is less transparent than some alternatives, so it pays to get a cost breakdown before committing.

Dropshipping lite is useful earlier in the cycle when you are still testing product-market fit and want to validate demand before committing to bulk manufacturing. Less relevant once you are doing full production runs but worth knowing where it fits.

What each one is actually best for:

Day one fulfillment: domestic warehousing and order fulfillment once goods are stateside and you want clean inventory syncing

Kanary solutions: production-side visibility, factory QC monitoring, the gap that sits before any inventory software can help

Best fulfill: combined sourcing and fulfillment under one vendor, though clarifying the fee structure upfront matters

Dropshipping lite: demand validation before bulk ordering, not a fit for brands already doing China production runs