Hey Coda community!
We at Coda are looking to better understand the scenario of inventory management. It’s something we’ve seen a number of people do in the wild, but not something that we do ourselves internally. We’d love to get more insight from you all so we can really make the scenario shine.
To get more insight into the scenario, I’d love to hear from you if either
- You already use Coda to manage inventory, and are willing to chat about how you’re using it
- You have thoughts on what the pain-points are in using Coda for this, or ideas on improvements we could make to make it better
I’d also love to know if you’ve used any of our templates on the subject or implemented your own similar flows in Coda or elsewhere. For example this Equipment Inventory Manager, or Henry Hudson Granola’s inventory doc.
Feel free to post docs or thoughts directly to this thread, or to reach out personally to set up a live half-hour chat!
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Dear @gilgoldshlager41,
You remembered me about a development I have been putting in the fridge 
Almost a year ago, I have been playing to create a doc to make a combination between inventory management, production flow and logistic tracking tool. To be honest at that time I didn’t manage to get it to a working tool due to lack of skills and other priorities in my life. If I remember well, I got also problems with the size of the doc 
Although I don’t know how much time I will have in the near future, I still have a dream to see if together with other community members and Codans we will be able to shape it up.
I will start to pick up where I left, make some edits and try to explain at my best knowledge the challenges we will have to overcome and the result I expect to get.
I will share hopefully before Monday the 15th the doc under your post
UPDATE 14.04.2019: Unfortunatelly I am not able to finalize 
I use it to manage a large part list, part of that is public here that you can browse; https://coda.io/d/M3D-Official-Troubleshooting-Self-Help-Guide_dzE73kMbIAL/All-Parts-Table_sumF8#All-Data-Table_tuU3C/r1
on the private side,
we track inventory counts
use it for store pictures
use it to tag an item if anyone has a question or issue
use it to share bill of materials, to track spending, cost of goods, engineering
we use activity history if we ever want to see inventory count changes
we would make a picking system that would rollup count picks to give a single number, but the web solution for this doesnt work > the computation would have to be in the cloud as it will get too slow, with ~10,000 rows generated a year. We use airtable and it works fine, but CODA is superior in almost every way besides # of rows
I have tried literally dozens of inventory systems and they are far from what is needed and usually charge hundreds a month; they’re crude looking and require too many clicks. The better solutions are custom ERP systems - a one time cash pile in a dumpster fire, and continuous need for database expert if anything changes at all. But they do give useful barcode generation, kitting, and things like that.
Very basic functionality is missing from many of those inventory>focused systems. Imagine that, they have to do one thing, but can’t get it right, shows how difficult the problem must be. The system must all be Bespoke.
A key feature missing as you probably know - granular permissions, and syncing data between tables. Using the same data that is private for public drastically reduces error, miscommunication, and lost time
Dear @Michael_Armani,
Thank you for the 
opener
Using the forms and the at this stage more powerful bases from Airtable, embedded in Coda that is also my tool of preference, a ton of new possibilities are opening.
Great developments, looking forward for more valuable input and seeing creative solutions 