Excel has customarily been a part of any business organization or industry. It is presumably the most used tool by any startup or small organization. This tool is used for the purpose of tracking sales order, inventory management or simply collecting the client’s contact information. Though it is efficient and simple to use but as a business expands, shortcomings of Excel are visible. To alleviate the problems of Excel, transition from Excel to inventory management system is necessary.
Issues with Excel: 
One of the major issues with Excel is that it is not scalable. With growth of the industry, it will soon lose sight of the available inventory, unpaid invoices, and so on.
Excel is also inefficient at maintaining track of large quantities of items. There is a likelihood of data entry errors, which is more prominent if there is the frequent moving of inventory at different locations.
Also, the limited number of users have access, if you involve multiple individuals then only one can edit at a time.
Excel does not have the comfort of updating data at real-time. At any time, the spreadsheet could be out of sync with the actual count. As data changed at present update is not automatically in the spreadsheet, it needs to manually. Which can again lead to data entry error?
Lastly, Excel have limited features to help analyze historical data. To manage any enterprise, business insight on the past data is necessary and a proper representation of this data will only help to make sound decisions.
Moving towards new business tracking solution:
For a business which has just fledged and spreading its wings, simple spreadsheet will satisfy all their requirements. If you are a small business with small staff and relatively limited inventory, Excel will remain a suitable choice. However, as your business will grow and will continue to grow . You will start discovering the limitations of the Excel mentioned above. Consider this is as a time to move towards more efficient and cost-effective system. These systems are solely developed to manage your business like zapInventory. These softwares alleviate the shortcomings of any Excel and also provide additional features to manage your business more effectively.
Understanding business requirement:
Diverse businesses require different types of solutions. The system which worked for one industry may not work for others. Although the basic functionality of all the software remains the same, it is additional features and reliability which distinguishes one software from another. When you plan to move towards such systems, you need to have a clear idea about your requirements and what you expect from a dedicated system. But most of the businesses are unable to chalk down their requirements, fret not systems like zapInventory provide services to all types of business models. In systems like zapInventory you need to just mention your type of business and the software generates a setup convenient for your business where all your requirements will be taken care off.
Transitioning from Excel to enhance your business:
Excel is explicitly designed to use with a desktop/laptop and is not optimized for handheld devices. But inventory management systems are developed to work on any platform, be it desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Companies that have moved from excel to inventory management systems have witnessed progressive changes in their operations and have got a quick return on investment. Moving from excel to inventory management software starts with selecting the right inventory management software as mentioned above. After selecting an inventory management software it is just a matter of implementing the system and benefiting from it.
The key feature of implementing an inventory management system is the efficiency with which update the data in the system and accessibility of data remotely. These features will definitely help businesses become successful. Added benefit of moving towards an inventory management system is that you will get quick support if anyone has any issue. Also, update the inventory management systems regularly to provide new features and remove any errors present in the system. This way customer always has the latest system with modern features, unlike Excel .
As your business scales from small to mid-sized, selecting an inventory management system is one of the first and wisest steps you can take. To streamline the processes in your business, which will make tasks of your employees simple and make your customers happy.
Start using ZapInventory today
