Introduction and need help figuring out inventory workbook idea

I have and been searching/reading through the postings but have not found anything that has helped me figure this out as of yet. I have searched the terms "inventory" and "inventory retain". If you have any terms that you would think would help find the postings that would be great. Ether way I will keep digging.

I have had the same thought and looked into the apps but have not found one that we liked plus we already have wireless scanners purchased. We plan on starting excel for inventory once I have finished printing and placing the bin labels. The workbook will be used for several tasks: Writing up quotes, inventory, bill of materials on job sites. Till I figure this out I'll just use the Ctrl+F for inventory counting.

You mentioned programming, are you referring to macros? If so I am not familiar with that as of yet and would like to learn. Do you or anyone have any recommended sites or books that would aid in this?

I am surprised that someone hasn't already said, "Use a database!"

While this might not meet your needs, it does explain how a transaction-based system works.
https://www.excelforum.com/tips-and-...y-program.html.

You start with nothing. You take in 10 units of Acme Putty. You build widget A that uses two units of Acme Putty. So you create a transaction to remove 2 units of putty from inventory. You get 10 more units of putty. So now you have 10 - 2 + 10 units of putty. At no point do you ever store the total of anything*. It's all a sum of the transactions. With the right kind of data layout, you can do this with pivot tables.

Some of the transactions may be manual. You do a periodic check of your inventory locations on a schedule (cycle count) to see if what the databases says is there is actually there. So you should have a transaction type called Inventory Adjustment. These can be plus or minus. It could be shrinkage or somebody moved something and didn't record the proper move transaction.

* Once in a while, you stop everything except maybe small operations in "quarantine" (like take stuff in on the dock but don't put it in the computer yet) while you count everything in every location in the warehouse. This would be a time to archive the old data and scan everything in new. It might be worth while to give this transaction type a special name like "Physical Inventory."

By keeping track of transactions you can get a feel for material flow rather than static information.

This is way too much for a hobby - you can probably get along with two transactions: IN and OUT.