Hi there,
I am new to Coda and I want to find out if Coda is a good fit to design a basic inventory management system or maybe someone already has a template.
Regards
Gotz
@Gotz_Friedrich that’s a great question. You should chat with @benblee. He created a super cool template for managing bikes at a bike rental shop. What features would be important for your inventory management system?
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Hi
Very basic features would be enough for now, but the more the better:
Overall I would say there should be a function for order/purchase recording/sales/adjustments/reporting
The details of a stock item should include: ID code/Name/Description/Type/Brand/Quantity/Cost price/Selling Price/GP.
On reporting it would be nice to see for a custom period the sales and the profit made.
Nice to have:
- Order form, linked to gmail.
- A form for capturing new stock items (Person dealing with the delivery/receipts of purchases should only be able to access this form).
- Invoicing linked to stock sheet.
- Journal/Adjustments form (Limited access)
- Stock take functionality
That is it more or less.
That sounds like a pretty big system! This is more of a full Inventory and full Point of Sale system.
I think you can do a good bit of it in Coda though. A couple questions would be;
- Are you selling online or do you handle all sales yourself?
- What’s the magnitude of the sales (hundreds, thousands, or millions of units per year)?
When including sales, purchases, order fulfillment, client info, and vendor info, documents can grow large very fast. That’s why you see nearly all database centered solutions here. And when it’s tried in Excel, sheets become cumbersome quickly.
The short answer is that I would start building things in Coda and testing these features. At the least, Coda is going to be a much friendlier way to see stats and it’s a fantastic tool for sorting out your strategy.
I think to start off I would use a Table with two categories; Clients and Vendors.
Then I would add a separate Products Table that has all the product info you listed.
Then I would use Table Lookups to pull the client and vendor names into the Product Table to record sales to clients and purchases from vendors.
You can use various views and filters to help simplify the views of the tables. This is how you would keep running tallies of product counts.
I know it sounds a little vague, but it’s kind of a custom project, so it’s one that you’ll want to customize to your needs. Starting off with two separate tables let’s you run the tables as Product and Inventory Info and then a sort of separate CRM for the Client Table. This is where Coda is very strong and acts as a database by linking the two through lookups.
With all the new tools Coda is adding, this is all possible.
If you have questions or want to try building it out, I’ll do my best to help answer and help along the way. Feel free to keep the conversation going here!
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I need a very basic tool to track stock (Very low quantities, selling exclusive furniture). The supplier is one major supplier. Clients are cash clients.
Sales are done on a separate invoicing system.
I have one person responsible for ordering, one person responsible for sales and one for receiving deliveries from the major supplier.
Orders are done manually via e-mail, but could be spreadsheet based. It is unprobable that an item is ordered twice. So no complex data tables or ordering systems.
All I want to do at this stage is enter new stock arriving into a sheet (With the information mentioned previously). Then maybe a check against the order (Can be manually or done outside of Coda).
After a day (or live) the sales person must go to Coda and enter all sales with the reference from the invoice book.
So the owner can after a day (or live) see what stock is on hand. And can also see how much was sold had how much profit was made.
The main thing is the access levels. One person can only add new stock items, the other person can only enter sales and then I need some sort of audit trial and stock movement report.
Sorry forgot to give you some figures:
MAX 150 stock items on hand
Max 15 sales per day
The items are high quality, high prices, LOW quantities.