Nobody plans to run a business on a spreadsheet. It starts as a list of products, grows a price column, then a tab per location, then a macro nobody dares touch. By the time you're searching for an alternative, the sheet is both your inventory system and a daily source of low-grade dread.
The good news: the migration is smaller than it looks. The sheet already contains almost everything a real system needs. It's just wearing the wrong clothes.
Before you move anything
Resist the urge to import the sheet as-is. An hour of cleaning saves a month of confusion.
- Merge the duplicates. 'Gin - Bombay', 'Bombay Gin' and 'gin bombay 70cl' are one product wearing three names.
- Settle units now: what you buy in, what you sell in, and the conversion between them.
- Delete the ghosts: products with no sales in a year travel to the new system only as noise.
- Decide your SKU scheme once. Short, boring and consistent beats clever.
The cut-over weekend
Import products and suppliers first. That's a template and ten minutes, not a project. Then take opening counts on your quietest day, straight into the new system, blind. That count is your opening balance; the old sheet's numbers retire as history rather than migrating as fact.
Run the first full week with the sheet still open beside the system, updating nothing in it. When the Friday numbers agree, close the tab. Most teams need one week of parallel running to trust the new numbers; almost nobody needs two.
What changes after
The visible win is time: hours of copy-paste become a report that's simply there. The structural win is bigger: numbers stop having an author. Nobody 'does the stock' anymore, because the stock does itself, one sale and one delivery at a time, with a log of who touched what. That's the part no spreadsheet, however loved, was ever going to give you.
Stocked is the system these notes are written from. Start free or read more from the blog.