Inventory Management Software for Small Business

What it actually does, what to look for before you pick one, and how StockRoom does it: stock tracking, barcode scanning, reordering, and knowing what your stock is worth - from your phone or your computer, free up to 50 products.

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What is inventory management software?

Inventory management software is a system for tracking what stock a business has, where it is kept, and how it changes over time - every sale, delivery, count and adjustment recorded against the product it affects.

That replaces a spreadsheet that only one person remembers to update.

The job is the same whether the business is a market stall with fifty products or a warehouse with five thousand: know what you have, know what it is worth, and know before a customer does when something is about to run out. What differs is how much software is needed to do that job - which is the question the rest of this page tries to answer honestly, rather than assume more is always better.

Manage your stock from one place

StockRoom is eleven screens, each doing one job in the order stock actually moves through a business, from finding what you have to deciding what to buy next. Every account gets all eleven from the first product added - none of it is a paid add-on.

Find and scan

Find lists every product and where it is kept, so "how many of the blue ones are left" is a glance, not a walk to the back room. Scan reads a barcode with a phone camera and goes straight to that product, or starts a new one if the code has not been seen before.

Count, receive and move

Count is a blind stocktake: the expected figure stays hidden while you count, so the number you write down is what you actually see on the shelf, not a confirmation of what the system already believed. Receive records what a delivery actually contained, against the place it went into. Move takes stock from one location and puts it in another as one act, so nothing is ever counted twice or in neither place.

Pick, sell and buy

Pick reserves what an order needs and lists it in shelf order. Sell records what left and where it left from. Buy shows what has dropped under the level you set, and how much to order, worked out from how fast it actually sells.

Optimise and automate

Optimise finds stock that has stopped moving - money already spent and sitting on a shelf. Automate works out a sensible reorder point for every product from its own sales history, rather than asking you to calculate two hundred of them by hand.

Know what you have and where it is

The most common way a small business loses track of stock is not a system failure - it is two people, or two locations, each with their own idea of what is on hand. A number that lives in one place and updates the moment something changes is the actual fix, more than any individual feature.

Use your phone to manage inventory

StockRoom runs the same in a phone's browser as it does on a desktop, and can be added to a phone's home screen like an app. Counting stock, scanning a barcode, and receiving a delivery are all things that happen standing next to the shelf, not sitting at a desk, so the phone is not a secondary way to use it - for most of these screens, it is the normal one.

Know when to reorder

A reorder point is the stock level at which you should place another order: enough left to cover the time it takes a new delivery to arrive, plus a buffer for a supplier running late or a week busier than usual. Working this out for one product by hand is a few minutes with a calculator; working it out for two hundred is a spreadsheet nobody keeps up to date.

Try the free reorder point calculator for a single product, or see how Automate works it out for every product from sales already recorded. For the fuller picture of reordering across a whole catalogue, see inventory reordering and replenishment.

Track stock value and turnover

Stock value is what is sitting on the shelf, at cost. Turnover is how many times a year you sell through it - the number that says whether cash is moving or sitting still. Both are figures a spreadsheet can hold, but both go stale the moment nobody updates them, which in practice is quickly.

Try the free inventory turnover calculator, see stock value kept live, per product, on Overview, or read about finding stock that has stopped moving on inventory optimisation.

Barcode inventory management

Barcode scanning removes the two slowest, most error-prone parts of stock work: typing a product name to find it, and typing it again to add a new one. A phone camera reads a barcode as well as dedicated hardware does for most small businesses, and a USB or Bluetooth scanner works too, typing into the same box.

Products with no barcode of their own - loose goods, own-made items - can be given one with the free barcode generator, using the number range reserved for use inside a single business. More on setting it up on the barcode inventory management page.

Inventory management software vs a spreadsheet

A spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool for a handful of products and one person keeping it up to date. It starts to break in three specific ways as a business grows: two people editing it at once with no record of who changed what, formulas that quietly break when a row is inserted in the wrong place, and no way to know from the numbers alone whether a stock count is current or three months stale.

None of that means a spreadsheet was the wrong choice to start with - it means the point has been reached where the cost of the workarounds is bigger than the cost of a dedicated tool.

Is there free inventory management software?

Yes, honestly: StockRoom is free for up to 50 products, with no card required to start and no time limit on the free tier. It includes barcode scanning, stock counts and full export - not a crippled trial of the paid product. The free tier stops when a 51st product is added, not when a clock runs out.

How to choose inventory management software

Rather than claim to be the best fit for everyone, here is what is actually worth checking before picking any inventory tool, StockRoom included:

• Does it match how many products and locations you actually have - not how many you might have in three years.
• Can you use it from a phone, if counting and receiving happen on the floor rather than at a desk.
• Does it record who changed what, and when - the difference between a stock figure you can trust and one you have to double-check.
• Can you get your data back out, in a format you could use elsewhere, including after you cancel.
• What does it cost at the size you will actually be in a year, not just the headline price at the size you are today.

How much does inventory management software cost?

StockRoom costs A$0 for up to 50 products, A$9 a month for up to 400, or A$89 a month for unlimited products, with no card required to start on the free plan.

No card is needed to start on the free plan, and choosing Basic or Pro begins with creating an account rather than a charge.

Who is StockRoom for?

Small retailers, online and marketplace sellers, and small warehouses running stock across more than one location. It is deliberately not built for manufacturing, multi-channel order sync, or businesses that need purchase orders and sales orders as one connected system - see how it compares with inFlow, Sortly and Zoho Inventory for where each of those is genuinely the better choice.

It suits stocktakers who count other businesses' stock as well: each client kept apart, counted blind, and a report handed over the same day. See stocktaking software for stocktakers.

Frequently asked questions