Everyone ought to maintain a Home Inventory List to document their home assets for insurance purposes. You don't necessarily need special home inventory software, though. A simple inventory spreadsheet should suffice, so go ahead and download the free Home Inventory template below. If you need more sophisticated inventory management software for your home or small business, try searching the Microsoft Office template gallery or check out our sponsors. Show Advertisement The Inventory Spreadsheet includes some of the common locations and items that you might want to consider when creating your own inventory list. Some of the descriptions in the inventory list, like "Electronics", are just placeholders to remind you to include your electronics. For insurance purposes, it would be better to list each item separately so that you can include the price, serial #, and model # for each item. Taking photos of your property for your home inventory will make working with your insurance company go a lot smoother. You might even want to do a walk-through video. Record a quick video clip of each room in your home, and store the video clips and digital photos on a flash drive with your inventory. When you have completed your home inventory, store a paper copy and a digital copy in a secure location outside of your home and/or in a fireproof safe. A safety deposit box or even a locked drawer in your office would probably work for an off-site location. DescriptionDownload our simple inventory spreadsheet, made specifically for listing the contents of your home for insurance purposes. Keep track of warranty information, purchase price, condition, serial numbers, and model numbers. Add your comments, tips, and suggestions on the related blog post listed below.
related blog articles More Inventory ResourcesInventory Management Software for Your BusinessExcel can be used as a database in the sense of storing and working with tables of information, but inventory control can quickly get too complicated for Excel. You may want to consider using Microsoft Access (a database program) or other specialized inventory management software. Related Content
The main problem with the above function is that you have to manually enter all of your incoming and outgoing products. When you have a large number of products, several people entering values, or a busy day, errors happen. For that reason, a barcode scanner is a useful tool for tracking inventory with Excel. Most USB and wireless barcode scanners are easy to program to integrate directly into Excel, and you can do so on separate lines or updating a single line. Programming for barcode scanners varies slightly by brand.  The standard function for a scanner is to press “Enter” or “Tab” after adding information to a cell. This means that it will add each newly scanned item to the next row or the next column. You can program it differently, usually by finding a scan code for changing the function, but we’ll go over a relatively easy way to program using the original multiple line code. Each time you scan a code, it automatically inputs the item’s SKU into your Excel document. Keep in mind that unless you assign additional values to the barcode scanner, it won’t put in other items such as value, product description, etc. You can most likely program this fairly easily using your barcode scanner codes, but this will differ depending on your software. You can use the SUMIF function to calculate running totals for the same item on different lines: =SUMIF (C5:C7,ES25,D5,D5:D7) Translated into plainer language: =SUMIF (Cell Range (usually all the way down the page), SKU To Look For (in this case, ES25), Sales To Add Up). For products remaining, you use the same SUM function used to calculate sales in the previous model. The best practice is to set the document up with your original SKUs on the top, with your current totals, and use the most right bars for sold and remaining items. You could put them at the bottom, but you’ll end up having to scroll anyway. You can also use a macro function to grab your data and move it to a separate page. The barcode scanner will enter items on the bottom of the sheet, but you will immediately see running totals on the top. If you use two different barcode scanners, you can use the same computer for both incoming and outgoing inventory; you just have to program the scanner to add to the “current stock column,” rather than the “sales column.” This allows you to quickly and easily update your running totals, whether you’re getting shipments or making sales. 3. Make your Excel tracker accessible in the CloudOne of the main limitations of Excel is that there isn't really a feasible way for multiple people to add to the same document at once. While you can solve this with multiple Excel documents, today’s technology presents another solution: the cloud. Microsoft has its own cloud solution with Office 365, but you can also use in Google Drive or some other free online solutions. Office 365 allows for multiple users, real-time updates, live backup, and several users editing the same document at once. A cloud inventory management system is especially useful if the inventory sheet is updated by multiple people or from multiple devices. The most valuable function is automatic synchronization. Plus, if you download a copy of Microsoft's OneDrive to your computer, you can keep a backup copy directly on your hard drive to ensure access in case of an Internet outage. 4. Generate inventory tracker reportsInventory tracker reports and analysis charts are relatively easy to generate, providing you are diligent about inventory tracking. You can choose to create reports on a daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis, as well as create quarterly and yearly reports. Set up your basic parameters for inventory and then dragging and dropping the sheet to a new Excel workbook. This automatically copies all of your work to the new one, which gives you a clean inventory page for each day, week, month, or however long you choose to keep records. You can also drag and drop all of your monthly records into one file to set up a yearly inventory, with individual sheets per month for easy organization. 5. Create running inventory totalsFor smaller businesses, or those with only a few large ticket items to keep track of, single inventory pages are the most convenient, because they allow you to allocate one page to each product. For larger businesses, or those with more products, you can create a running inventory for sales, profits, and products. The simplest example is deducting sales from your original stock figure: =SUM(D8-E8), replacing the D8 and E8 with specific cell locations that you want to subtract from each other. Create an original stock line and use that to deduct your sales from. This gives you an instant total that updates whenever you change the number in either cell. You can update the cell using either a manually entered number or using a scanner. Don’t forget you can use Autofill to populate cells using the same formula. Select the cells that contain the data that you want to fill into adjacent cells, then drag the fill handle across the cells. This will stop you from having to repeat the formula in multiple boxes for multiple products. If you want to keep better track of a few large ticket items, you might want to use individual sheets per item, which uses the same functions, except you set up one sheet per item and set your scanner to input different SKUs on specific sheets. Beyond spreadsheetsExcel can be an extremely versatile inventory tracker for startups, especially if you know how to use it to your advantage. While some of the formulas may seem a bit complex if you aren't familiar with using them, it’s relatively easy to learn and allows you a lot more flexibility when managing your inventory in Excel. Plus, they enable you to reduce the manual labor and mind-numbing data entry by making Excel and machines like barcode scanners do most of the tedious work for you. Although a great starting point, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, especially for businesses looking to grow and scale. As the demands and complexity of your business grow, you will need to utilize a more sophisticated inventory and order management system to ensure you are well-equipped to handle an increase in stock and sales. If you run a small business or ecommerce store, you can probably meet your inventory management needs with our basic Excel inventory list template. Use it to track raw materials and products by quantity and unit price. You’ll also find some handy formulas to help you keep track of inventory value per item and when you need to reorder stock. If you run a more complex business or a large ecommerce store, you might need a more comprehensive inventory management template. In this case, choose our Excel inventory management template. This template has all the features of the basic template, plus an extra tab to help you manage all your vendor information in one place. Check out the glossary of terms, below, to help you get more from our free excel inventory template with formulas. Download basic Excel inventory list template Download Excel inventory management template Prefer working in Google Sheets? Check out our Google Sheets inventory templates. |
