Was chatting with a chap online today, who runs his own small business, about inventory management.
I'd love nothing more than to have up-to-date live stock levels but it'll never happen as these companies charge £100 per month upwards for the amount of orders we dispatch.
This guy said, "Well why not use Office 365", I chuckled to myself nervously, he continued, "Could you not use a single workbook with 4 sheets in it, with a master stock bible as the first sheet then just do lookups on that for the 3 others sheets that are formatted into the relevant import format for EKM, ebay, Amazon? Then just individually download each sheet in turn into the correct format required and upload them? That would be my first approach and see if that speeds things up for you."
Ummm! Lookups. Those things that cause complete confusion to me.
Are lookups really the solution? I've heard people argue that a database is the way to go but as I have zero experience in Access, Excel seems the preferred choice.
Here's the rub!
In Ebay, we should use Custom Labels which we can use to define a SKU.
In Amazon, they have a SKU field which may be different to the item SKU in Ebay or on our website.
On our website, we should use Product Code to act as the SKU.
Is the first code to align all the various fields so they are all match each other or would it not matter?
Then we simply need a price and quantity field. The quantity field is the crux of the problem. I'm guessing we need to maintain the first sheet and the other sheets would pick the quantity from the first sheet. We'd need different pricing columns to allow alteration of the prices where necessary to take amount of selling fees, etc.
So what I cannot get my head around is the stock levels change on ANY of the three platforms at the time someone makes a purchase. I need to work out the format of how this downloads from each site and would presumably paste it into that platform's worksheet. Then the front sheet should update automatically taking account of any new imports of stock into the other two platforms' worksheets.
BUT THEN!
Say if we realise the stock level is wrong on the front sheet for a particular item, we need to be able to change that and it propagate the value back to the other worksheets which we can then save out to the relevant format and re-upload to each platform with the correct inventory values.
Is this even possible in Excel?
I'd love nothing more than to have up-to-date live stock levels but it'll never happen as these companies charge £100 per month upwards for the amount of orders we dispatch.
This guy said, "Well why not use Office 365", I chuckled to myself nervously, he continued, "Could you not use a single workbook with 4 sheets in it, with a master stock bible as the first sheet then just do lookups on that for the 3 others sheets that are formatted into the relevant import format for EKM, ebay, Amazon? Then just individually download each sheet in turn into the correct format required and upload them? That would be my first approach and see if that speeds things up for you."
Ummm! Lookups. Those things that cause complete confusion to me.
Are lookups really the solution? I've heard people argue that a database is the way to go but as I have zero experience in Access, Excel seems the preferred choice.
Here's the rub!
In Ebay, we should use Custom Labels which we can use to define a SKU.
In Amazon, they have a SKU field which may be different to the item SKU in Ebay or on our website.
On our website, we should use Product Code to act as the SKU.
Is the first code to align all the various fields so they are all match each other or would it not matter?
Then we simply need a price and quantity field. The quantity field is the crux of the problem. I'm guessing we need to maintain the first sheet and the other sheets would pick the quantity from the first sheet. We'd need different pricing columns to allow alteration of the prices where necessary to take amount of selling fees, etc.
So what I cannot get my head around is the stock levels change on ANY of the three platforms at the time someone makes a purchase. I need to work out the format of how this downloads from each site and would presumably paste it into that platform's worksheet. Then the front sheet should update automatically taking account of any new imports of stock into the other two platforms' worksheets.
BUT THEN!
Say if we realise the stock level is wrong on the front sheet for a particular item, we need to be able to change that and it propagate the value back to the other worksheets which we can then save out to the relevant format and re-upload to each platform with the correct inventory values.
Is this even possible in Excel?
