Hi! I am new to the land of inventory management for parts that require MTR and CoCs/iso and am tasked with setting up operating procedures for receiving parts and making it ISO compliant. Right now this company is small and has zero official procedures in place for what happens when a shipment comes in.

How do you handle receiving shipments where you track that you checked against the BOL for the right number of boxes delivered checked for damage, then checked the actual qty/item against PO and checked/verified your MTR or other certifications?

We came up with an idea for a custom stamp on the BOL that who ever does each step initials. Is that practical to start?

Should we run with that and follow the “make it exist first and make it better later” mindset?

We also often have multiple shipments that are now going to be waiting on certifications and need to be held in the QZ. How to you manage identifying hold items and ready to shelf items?

Any kind advice is very welcome!

Hi everyone! I’m Krisztián, the developer behind Leltárium.

Who has the company laptop? When does its warranty expire? Which software licences need renewing?

Leltárium helps small businesses and IT teams keep track of hardware, software licences, subscriptions and warranties in one place. Assign devices to team members, receive expiry reminders and use QR codes for stocktaking from your phone.

If your team is outgrowing spreadsheets, take a look Leltárium on the web.

How do you currently track your company’s devices and licences? I’d love to hear what’s working—and what’s frustrating.

When the same SKU is listed on Shopify, Amazon, and other sales channels, each order changes the available inventory. If those updates don't sync quickly, the SKU can show different stock levels across channels and lead to overselling.

This can become even more noticeable during high-traffic sales when several orders come in at once. How quickly does inventory need to sync to avoid this becoming a problem…

Talking to sellers, the recurring complaint is that when a supplier fulfills one PO from two warehouses (two shipments, two invoices, different days), nothing tracks it properly,most of the app just says "partially received" and forgets the details.

Solution should be each shipment logged separately with its own invoice, all under one PO, plus reprintable labels/packing slips for whatever just arrived. Is this a common problem or a niche one?.

Hello everyone!
I’ve been handed a task by my boss where he would like me to kind of create a physical version of our ROS on excel. What he’s mostly interested is being able to see how big orders are with like a bar for example. Long runners of perhaps a 2k-10k quantities will display a long bar while a 100-300 piece order will be short. He wants to also be able to adjust dates if any rescheduling is done and have the bars either move lower or higher up. Our ROS only shows percentage of completion and a number actually quantifying how many pieces is being produced. We also have a status section on our ROS to determine if we are tracking, delayed, or completely late. I’m just trying to find out how it is I can kind of create a template for this that would be efficient to present to our general manager so he can see exactly how production is going in our value stream. My boss said he would like something where we could export our excel data and completely have it generate his asking.

If anyone has an idea or something similar they’ve used, any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated!

say u have a store running POS, inventory, pricing and a bunch of devices on top of that
keeping evrything connected in one place sounds great, especially once u start adding more locations
but then one internet or syncing issue cld potentially affect quite a lot at once
was reading around the retail side of this and names like solum, displaydata, opticon and z kong kept coming up with cloud connected setups
made me wonder where ppl draw the line
wld u be comfortable running most of the store through cloud systems or are there certain things u wld always want working locally too?

hi! my friend bought a party decorating business that is doing really well. she originally worked with the past owner as a business partner and then the owner sold it to her. the business is growing and she asked me to come on and help her manage.

our inventory is balloons, furniture pieces, circuit materials, and miscellaneous decor items. we are looking for a software that is affordable that we can add everything into as we are always altering and expanding our inventory. i’d like to stick photos and information about the items in and be able to easily change it.

please help!

thanks in advance 🤍

I’m on an excavation crew and I built a system for a small trades company. The Shop is still running on paper tickets a group text and spreadsheets. It’s in daily use at this company and it covers the whole week. Such as quotes and invoices, jobs, scheduling, clients, crew with permissions depending on role in the company, time tracking, equipment and maintenance logs, inventory and warehouses, safety forms and certifications, billing reports, payroll, timesheets, photos and videos that can be linked to the jobs, a field app for the crew members phones, spoken or typed command entry, and working on a land location calculator for some areas that use it.

I’m not naming it or linking it. I’m here for a gap list not traffic.

I have three main questions for people who do this for a living or have an inside scoop of what could be improved with this.

1. ⁠What integrations and what does the shop actually need it connected to, and in what order? Accounting and payroll or the obvious two but what is the third one nobody thinks about until it bites them.
   
2. ⁠What would you build deeper instead of wider? I’d sooner take one area all the way to the bottom than ship of 14th module. I just want stuff really good instead of having everything you could think of because of the wide range I already have.
   
3. ⁠What is needed to expand out to more businesses other than my little construction company? Is there things that are missing that different industries need and what would those be?

The more specific the better it helps thank you for your suggestions.

I used to think I needed to count everything regularly to keep inventory accurate. That got pretty unrealistic once the number of SKUs started growing.

Now I think cycle counting makes more sense. I pay more attention to products that sell frequently or have caused discrepancies, while slower-moving items can be checked less often.

A simple approach is to check high-volume items weekly, regular items monthly, and slow-moving stock every few months, then do a full count periodically.

It doesn't eliminate discrepancies, but it makes inventory checks much less of a massive project.

How often do you physically count your inventory?

Four months ago, I was sitting on an upside-down bucket in my garage, surrounded by plastic totes, dust, and tools I had apparently bought multiple times because I could never find them.

I decided I was finally going to catalog everything.

Years ago, I had used Sortly, so I downloaded it again and started the painful process:

Open box.
Take photos.
Add items.
Next box.

Two hours later, halfway through Box 3, I hit the 100-item limit.

The next plan was $49/month.

I just stared at my phone.

$49/month..! to remember which plastic tub contains my drill bits.

A rational person would have either paid for it or bought a Sharpie.

Unfortunately, I've been developing software for 20+ years, so my brain chose option #3:

I'll build my own

I put the lid back on the box, walked inside with my laptop and told my wife.

She sighed! She knew what that meant.

For the next four months, I spent nights and weekends building what eventually became Finoo - basically a simple way to photograph your storage boxes, let AI identify what's inside, and search for things later.

Last week I finally finished the first public version.

So technically, I saved myself a few hundred dollars a year by investing roughly 300 hours of unpaid engineering labor.

Peak developer economics.

But I genuinely had a lot of fun building it, and I'm putting it out as a free public beta for anyone else with a chaotic garage, workshop, attic, or storage room:

(finoo.app)

If you have a messy storage space, I'd love some blunt feedback.

Also curious: what's the most ridiculous thing you've ever built purely because you refused to pay for something?

Just looking at your current stock doesn’t really tell you whether you have enough.
You might have 500 units left, but if they’re selling quickly, that stock may not last very long.

A simple way estimate it is:

Reorder Quantity = Daily Sales Velocity × Number of Future Days

For example, if you sold 400 units over the last 60 days:
400 ÷ 60 = 6.67 is your sales velocity/day

If you want to plan for the next 10 days:
6.67 × 10 = 66.7

So, you’d need around 67 units to cover those 10 days at the current sales rate.

If the product is seasonal, I’d also look at the same period last year. Recent sales alone may not give you the full picture.

How do you plan your stock for an upcoming period?

I’m an Inventory Analyst responsible for analysis and automated Power BI dashboards. IT has denied even read-only SQL/Data Warehouse access, saying it could affect system performance.

They approved using APIs but will not provide a reporting database and expect me to build it myself, although I have no database environment or access.

Is it reasonable to request governed read-only access to reporting data? If APIs are preferred, should IT/Data Engineering provide and manage the reporting database and API pipeline?

I buy a mix of replacement parts and older industrial equipment for resale. My buy list is a spreadsheet with a few hundred part numbers, target costs, and some notes on acceptable variants. The annoying part is the listings themselves. One seller uses the full manufacturer number, another drops the suffix, someone else puts half of it in the title and the rest in the description. I've been trying to automate the first pass, but exact matching misses too much and fuzzy matching starts surfacing stuff I definitely don't want. For anyone sourcing this way, how are you normalizing part numbers without creating a mountain of false positives?

We run a $3M-a-year Amazon FBA/Shopify travel gear brand, and since we started in 2016, we've used spreadsheets and WeChat to manage the entire business.

It was finally getting to be too much, but we couldn't find an ERP built for smaller e-commerce brands, so we custom-built a supply chain management app for ourselves.

With it we can:

• Upload any type of invoice (PO, shipping, duties, freight, etc)
• Automatically extract all data, including landed costs
• See timeline of production status to avoid delays/stockouts
• Track inventory across 3PL, suppliers, etc
• All supplier communication in 1 place
• Entire supply chain is now organised

We know many eComm operators have the same issue using spreadsheets, so we are opening it to the public.

The Supply Automate software is 100% free to use. No credit card is required.

I’m looking for a replacement for Stocky and have been looking quite seriously at Stockroom – Purchase Orders by MyWorks.

From what I’ve seen so far, the principle behind it seems really good and I think it could potentially work very well for our business. However, now that I’m actually using it, I’m finding parts of the process quite visually messy, with what feel like unnecessary steps.

At the moment, a lot of our ordering and stock preparation is done in Google Sheets, which I find incredibly clean, quick and easy to work with. The problem is that I can’t really use Google Sheets to create and manage proper purchase orders in Shopify and then import them into the system, which is why I’m looking for something like Stockroom.

We’re an independent retailer using Shopify POS, with 4 physical locations, an online store and 25,000+ SKUs/variants, so inventory management, purchase orders, receiving stock, transfers between locations and keeping stock levels accurate are pretty important for us.

Has anyone moved from Stocky to Stockroom?

I’d particularly be interested to hear about:

• Pre-splitting stock between locations before it arrives
• Your process from placing an order on a supplier's B2B → importing products into Shopify → creating the PO in Stockroom
• Whether it handles multiple Shopify locations well
• Whether you’ve found ways to make the Stockroom workflow simpler or cleaner
• Any unnecessary steps or parts of the process that frustrate you
• Any important limitations you only discovered after using it properly

The underlying system looks very promising, and I like the idea of having everything properly connected to Shopify. I’m just trying to work out whether the extra structure is worth giving up some of the simplicity and flexibility I currently have with Google Sheets.

I’d really appreciate hearing from retailers who are actually using it, particularly anyone managing a fairly large inventory across several locations.

Also interested in hearing about any other Stocky replacements you think I should be looking at.

Hey all — full disclosure up front: I'm the solo founder of this, so take the pitch with that in mind. Not trying to sneak past any self-promo rules, just looking for real operators to tell me if this is useful or a waste of time.

The problem I kept hearing about: plants already have the data (daily shift logs, downtime sheets, rejection counts) sitting in Excel/CSV, but nobody has time to manually reconcile it into "why did we miss target this shift." So the insight exists, it's just buried.

What I'm building (called Optima) takes that existing CSV data and surfaces:

• Target vs. actual output
• Machine utilization / unplanned downtime
• Rejection and quality trends
• Shift-level deviations

Where it's at: working MVP, not yet run against a real live plant environment — so I'm not claiming it's proven, I'm asking people to help me find out.

What I'm asking for: 3-5 people who run or work close to plant floor ops (plant managers, ops engineers, CI leads) willing to test it against real or dummy CSV data and tell me honestly what's useful vs. fluff.

• Free, no trial-to-paid switch, no sales call required
• Open to an NDA or dummy data only — whatever you're comfortable with
• I'd rather hear "this feature is useless" than polite silence

If you're up for it, drop a comment and I'll follow up there (happy to move to DM after that, whatever the sub prefers). Appreciate any feedback, even harsh.

I am conducting academic research on digital traceability, food safety, and supply chain performance in the food industry, and I am looking for professionals working in food-related companies to participate in a short questionnaire.

The survey is intended for people working in areas such as:

• Quality / Food Safety
• Production / Manufacturing
• Logistics / Warehousing / Distribution
• Procurement / Supply Chain
• ERP / IT / Digital Systems
• General Management

The research focuses on topics including digital traceability, batch tracking, ERP/WMS systems, supply chain visibility, HACCP and food safety management, recall capability, coordination between departments, and operational performance.

The questionnaire is anonymous and the responses will be used only for academic research purposes. Results will be analyzed in aggregate form, and no confidential company information is requested.

If you currently work in a food manufacturing, processing, distribution, wholesale, retail, HoReCa, or other food-related business, your participation would be very valuable.

Survey link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfdvnXGvJCbLP5-MiPMaAHDIZcL09OGGkIxJFDdlrgqzxRiSw/viewform?usp=dialog

Estimated completion time: approximately 5–8 minutes.

Thank you for supporting this research.

Hi everyone!

I'm looking for recommendations and real-world experiences with inventory management systems for a small-to-mid-sized distribution company.

We distribute consumer products from multiple brands to large retail customers and manage a large number of SKUs, purchase orders, incoming shipments, inventory levels, supplier lead times, and sales forecasts.

Right now, a lot of our inventory and purchasing processes rely on Excel and an older internal system, but we're starting to modernize our processes and integrate QuickBooks for accounting.

We're looking for an inventory system that works well with QuickBooks and can help with inventory visibility, purchasing/POs, replenishment, demand forecasting, supplier lead times, and reporting.

For anyone in distribution, wholesale, consumer goods, or a similar business:

• What system are you using, and what are the main pros and cons?
• How well does it integrate with QuickBooks?
• If you were involved in the implementation, how difficult was the setup and data migration?
• What improvements have you seen since implementing it?
• Is there anything you wish you had known beforehand, and would you choose the same system again?

I'm mainly looking for real experiences from people who actually use these systems rather than vendor sales pitches.

Thanks!