Inventory Management Software for Small Business

Take a hardware shop in Ahmedabad with a counter on the main road and a godown two streets away. On the first day the owner imports the item list from an Excel export of the old software, then enters opening stock and a minimum level for each item. Say one item is a 1-inch steel hinge: 300 pieces in the godown, 60 at the counter, minimum level 50.

A contractor buys 40 hinges at the counter. The sales invoice is set to sell from the counter, so it takes 40 out of the counter, which now shows 20. Because 20 is below the minimum of 50, the hinge turns up on the Stock Alerts screen and in the bell. Someone moves 100 pieces across with a stock transfer: the godown goes from 300 to 200, the counter from 20 to 120, and the shop still owns 320 hinges in total. The numbered transfer note goes with the handcart as a PDF.

Next week a supplier delivers 150 hinges. The owner enters the purchase bill against the godown, and stock rises there. If the order went through a goods receipt note with a quality check instead, only the accepted quantity enters stock and the rejected pieces stay out, ready to go back on a purchase return.

Valuation follows the buying rate. If the shop held 100 hinges bought at ₹40 and then buys 50 more at ₹46, the stock is worth ₹4,000 + ₹2,300 = ₹6,300, and the weighted-average cost is ₹6,300 ÷ 150 = ₹42 a piece. When hinges are later sold at ₹60, the item profit report works out the margin against that ₹42, not against whichever rate was paid last.

Not every movement is a sale or a purchase. Five hinges get damaged in the godown: a stock out entry with a reason removes them. A count finds four more than the system shows: an adjustment puts the figure right. At month end the owner prints a count sheet for the godown, the staff count every shelf, and posting the sheet corrects all the differences in one go. Samples sent to a site go out on a stock-out too. Each of these appears in the stock ledger with its date, so you can trace any figure back to the entry that caused it.

If you carry batch numbers, on Pro you can type a batch on stock in, stock out, transfers, goods receipts and production entries. On Pro, batch & expiry dates go on the purchase bill and every sale takes the earliest-expiring batch, never an expired one, with an Expiring Stock report for what runs out next and a Return expired to supplier button that fills the purchase return; serial/IMEI numbers are recorded per piece; and size/colour variants each keep their own stock. On every plan, an item can have other units such as BOX = 12 PCS, with stock kept in pieces. For the bigger picture on keeping several storage points straight, read multi-godown stock management, and for the basics, what inventory management is.

• Stock-outs take stock out of the warehouse you pick; sales invoices use the godown chosen on the invoice (and the consignment godown for a consignment item's shortfall), and POS bills use the terminal's warehouse.
• Purchase bills, goods receipts, sale returns (when you choose to restock) and stock-ins bring it back in.
• A delivery challan does not move stock on its own; the stock moves when the challan is converted into an invoice.
• A manual stock-out will not let a warehouse go below zero. A sales invoice can, by design, so a sale is never blocked at the counter because an earlier purchase was not entered yet.