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Excel-erating Beyond the Inventory Forecasting Spreadsheet

Mar 28,2024

An Excel spreadsheet is like marmite: you either love it or hate it.

If you’re in the ‘love it’ camp, you may have turned that passion into building a custom inventory forecasting solution for your company.

For some time, your spreadsheet is the foundation of well-oiled, optimised inventory, saving thousands of dollars by reducing stock-outs and excess inventory. 

And then you get offered a new job elsewhere and leave.

I recently happened upon a comment from a business owner who faced this situation. When one of her employees resigned, they took with them all of the knowledge that went into building and maintaining the spreadsheet.

In their wake, they left a web of Excel tabs. For the business owner, she may as well have been staring at a book written in a foreign language.

The spreadsheet puzzle

I always ask our customers how they forecasted demand before they joined StockTrim. Their responses are amazing. 

There are hundreds of ways to arrive at a forecast. And somehow, they almost always seem to work - even if it’s a bit unorthodox. Humans are adept at getting by using limited resources.

The problem is: there’s no playbook to follow when something goes wrong and invariably, that’s exactly what happens.

A whopping 90% of spreadsheets used for inventory forecasting contain mistakes. Those errors result in a storm of head-scratching and bruised egos when an order goes amiss. 

It’s also manual. Spreadsheets are not just messy, they suck up time. 

Cheaper than a gym membership

The good news is that as a SMB, you can tap into extraordinary insights using automation, machine learning and big data analysis.

Smart, cloud-based software like StockTrim can be purchased on subscription, sync immediately with your inventory, then present a dashboard and detailed analysis of your inventory.

In a heartbeat, you have access to a purchasing plan based on your lead times, locations, and seasonality.

With machine learning, StockTrim improves your forecast over time as it learns more about your stock behaviours.

This software is designed not for Excel wizards or data scientists, but the business owner who just wants happy customers and clean inventory.

And you're definitely not alone. StockTrim helps businesses in all corners of the world access reliable forecasting and inventory control.

If you’re ready to substitute your spreadsheet for StockTrim, give it a try today with our 14 day free trial.