Practical guide / Inventory Control Kit 2.2
What should I restock before the next delivery?
You have packaging in one cupboard, finished pieces on another shelf and a list of supplier orders somewhere else. A low-stock flag alone does not tell you whether an item will last until the next delivery, or how much a restock will cost. This kit connects your manual stock register to a purchasing review.
Your first useful result: Follow one notebook to the reorder list. Follow the first task
Set up the items you actually keep
Enter a unique SKU, product name, unit cost, opening quantity, reorder level, target stock and supplier.
The workbook checks identifiers and numeric inputs before using the records in its summaries.
Review: Keep your finished products and supplies in one consistent register.
Record each delivery and use
Add a dated IN or OUT movement with the SKU, quantity and a reference or note.
Balances include movements up to the selected review date. The workbook separately measures OUT quantities in the trailing 30-day window.
Review: Review the stock position for a chosen date and see which items have been used recently.
Add the supplier constraints
Record supplier lead times and minimum order quantities in the Suppliers sheet.
When stock reaches its threshold or estimated cover is at or below supplier lead time, the suggestion uses the largest of the minimum order quantity, the gap to target stock and the gap to cover lead-time usage.
Review: Review a purchasing suggestion with the delivery delay and order minimum visible.
Review before placing an order
Choose your review date, resolve input warnings and open Reorder.
The sheet brings stock cover, suggested purchase quantities, indicative purchase cost and order timing into one review.
Review: Decide what to order outside the workbook, with the stock evidence beside you.
Check the assumptions.
- One stock pool and one currency per workbook; no warehouse-to-warehouse transfers.
- Manual records: no barcode scanning, ecommerce sync, supplier ordering or accounting integration.
- Stock cover uses recorded recent usage; it is not a demand forecast.
- No bill of materials, batch production, unit conversion or inventory accounting method.
- The supplied calculation ranges have fixed capacities. Adding rows requires extending formulas and validations.
- Resolve every input warning before relying on calculated views.
Keep a copy you can return to.
Keep the supplied clean and example files unchanged. Save your own working file with a useful name, such as inventory-control-2027-home.xlsx, and keep a dated backup before a large edit. A purchased ZIP is the blank source, not a backup of your entries.
If an input or formula is replaced
Undo the edit while it is still available, or return to a known good backup. If you need a fresh clean file, transfer only your records into its marked input cells and follow the setup guide again. Do not paste whole sheets over the supplied formulas, validations or reference lists. Check IDs, units, dates and linked results against the example before relying on the copy.
When the supplied rows are full
100 products · 500 movements · 50 suppliers. Calculation ranges and validations have fixed capacities. A new row below a table does not prove that every linked result includes it.
For a separate period, project or volume, preserve the old workbook and start a named clean copy. If records must carry forward, record exactly which inputs you transfer, preserve their references and compare the opening and closing figures. Avoid copying historical activity as both an opening amount and a new movement. There is no automatic migration between files.
Inspect the workbook before you choose.
View its real sheets and a fictional calculation example.
Explore Inventory Control KitWritten for version 2.2. Examples describe the supplied workflow; they are not customer results.