Free inventory template for Excel and Google Sheets. Items, a movements log, live stock on hand with reorder alerts and a monthly stocktake reconciliation tab.
Inventory in Excel works when you follow one rule: never overtype a stock figure. List items once with a reorder point, log every movement (in, out, adjustment) in a running log, and let SUMIFS work out the live balance. Then reconcile with a monthly stocktake so the spreadsheet and the shelf never drift far apart.
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A free inventory management Excel template for small businesses that track stock in a spreadsheet. One workbook with an items list, a movements log so every in, out and adjustment leaves a record, a live stock on hand tab with red, amber and green reorder alerts, and a monthly stocktake tab that reconciles the count against the system. It works in Google Sheets too.
One Excel workbook: Items with reorder points, a Movements log, live Stock on hand with red/amber/green alerts, and a monthly Stocktake reconciliation tab. Enter your details and the file downloads immediately.
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Download Excel workbookFormulas cover 200 items and 500 movements out of the box and extend easily. Values in GBP, example figures illustrative. Rates last checked: 15 July 2026.
Small business forums are full of the same arc. The stock spreadsheet starts simple and works fine. Then the business gets busier, two people start updating it, a few movements get missed, and one day the sheet says 40 and the shelf says 12. From that point the owner is, in the words of one poster, fixing spreadsheet mistakes instead of running the business.
The template is built to delay that day as long as possible. A movements log means errors are correctable because there is a history. A monthly stocktake means drift gets caught at a small size. Those two habits are most of what inventory software does for you anyway.
But there is a genuine ceiling. When multiple people book stock in and out all day, when you sell across channels that each need live availability, or when the weekly reconciliation eats hours, the spreadsheet has become a job in itself. Moving to an inventory or ERP system at that point is mostly a data problem: cleaning SKUs, deciding what the real balances are, and mapping your columns to the new system's fields. That groundwork is what we do at Digital Adaption, and it is exactly what our data migration readiness review covers before you commit to any software.
Use three connected tabs, not one. List each item once with its reorder point, log every stock movement (in, out, adjustment) in a running log, and let formulas work out the live balance per SKU. The one rule that makes it work: never overtype a stock figure. If the shelf disagrees with the sheet, post an adjustment movement so there is a record of the correction.
An items list with SKU, name, category, unit cost and reorder point. A movements log with date, SKU, type and quantity. A live stock on hand view calculated with SUMIFS. And a stocktake tab that compares counted quantities against the system figure and values the variance. This free template has all four.
Every SKU on the Stock on hand tab gets a red, amber or green status. Red means the balance is at or below the reorder point you set on the Items tab, amber means it is within 25% above it, green means you are fine. The colours update automatically as movements are logged.
Usually because balances are being edited directly, so corrections destroy the history and errors compound. Movements get missed, typed against the wrong SKU, or entered twice. The fix is a movements log plus a regular stocktake: count the shelf monthly, compare it with the system figure, investigate the variance and post it as an adjustment. That keeps errors small and visible instead of large and mysterious.
Yes. Upload it to Google Drive and open it with Google Sheets. It only uses portable functions (SUMIFS, VLOOKUP and IF), so the live balances, the dropdowns and the red/amber/green formatting all carry over.