Inventory Tracker Starter Kit
A five-tab Excel workbook for makers, bakers, and small-batch sellers running their inventory out of a spreadsheet. Tab one is a Read Me with the workflow and the workbook's deliberate limits. Tabs two through four are Raw Materials, Finished Goods, and Packaging — each with on-hand quantity, reorder point, a status column that turns the row red / amber / green, and a per-row inventory value that calculates itself. Tab five is the Purchase Log: every supplier order, line-by-line, with month-to-date and year-to-date spend at the top. Built to take you through the first 50–150 SKUs and the first year of selling — and built to make the spreadsheet method's limits visible the day you outgrow it.
- A Raw Materials tab with on-hand qty, reorder point, last unit cost, supplier, and lead time — plus a status column that reads on-hand vs. reorder point and tells you what to do
- A Finished Goods tab tracking what is on the shelf ready to sell, with wholesale and retail price columns and stock value at retail
- A Packaging tab for the boxes, mailers, labels, and tape that ship — with the same reorder-point status logic
- Conditional formatting that flashes the row red when on-hand drops below half the reorder point, amber when it hits the reorder point, gray when it gets close, and green when stock is healthy
- A Purchase Log tab with month-to-date and year-to-date spend totals computed automatically — the running record of cost-of-goods that pays off every April 15
- Sample rows across candles, soap, baked goods, and jewelry you can replace with your own catalog in a few minutes
Or skip the spreadsheet entirely
A spreadsheet runs your inventory until it can't. Ardent Seller picks up where it leaves off — multi-location balances, recipes that decrement materials when you produce, automatic cost roll-ups when a vendor price changes, photos and barcodes per item, lot/batch traceability, and an audit trail of every change. Same data model you already think in (materials → recipes → batches → sales), without the formulas you have to maintain by hand.
Multi-location inventory
Track raw materials, finished goods, and packaging separately by location — booth, studio, retail partner — with a single running balance per item.
Recipe costing & production runs
Producing a batch decrements materials and packaging automatically — the spreadsheet's biggest blind spot, solved at the data layer.
Reorder thresholds & alerts
Set a reorder point per item and get a ready-to-order list any time you sit down to do supplier orders — no walking the shelves to figure out what is low.
Related resources
Monthly Inventory Count Sheet
Three sections, one page. Print, count, and reconcile raw materials, finished goods, and packaging — with expected, actual, and variance columns.
End-of-Month Closeout Checklist
Seven steps to a clean monthly close — sales reconciliation, inventory counts, expense review, P&L, planning, reordering, and backup. Print one each month.
Spreadsheet vs Inventory Software: The Decision Guide
When a spreadsheet is enough, when it stops working, and how to tell the difference before it costs you.
Product Pricing Calculator
A working Excel pricing calculator — materials, labor, packaging, and platform fees in, a defensible retail price out. Plus a batch tab that shows what 50 vs. 10 actually costs.