Inventory Tracker Template for Small Business (Excel + Google Sheets)

What's included: products, purchases, sales, and a dashboard in one file

The template is organized into six sheets: Instructions, Settings, Products, Purchases, Sales, and Dashboard. The Instructions tab explains where to enter data and how each formula works, so you don't need to reverse-engineer a spreadsheet someone else built for themselves.

Settings is where you define your product categories, sales channels (Etsy, online store, craft fair, wholesale), a global reorder threshold, and each supplier's lead time in days. Products holds your SKU list with unit cost, default price, starting stock, and per-item reorder thresholds and lead times. Purchases and Sales are simple entry logs, pulling product and channel names from dropdown lists so you're not retyping SKUs by hand.

Every input cell uses data validation and sits on a pale yellow background so you always know what's safe to edit versus what's a protected formula. Nothing here requires enabling macros or installing an add-in; it opens and calculates the same way in Excel and Google Sheets.

Profit and margin dashboard by product

Current stock is calculated automatically as starting stock plus purchases minus sales, so you're not manually reconciling counts after every order. Behind that, the template computes cost of goods sold using a weighted-average cost per SKU, then derives gross margin in dollars and gross margin percentage for every product you sell.

The Dashboard pulls this into four KPIs — total stock value, trailing 30-day sales, trailing 30-day gross margin, and the number of SKUs currently under their reorder threshold — plus a bar chart of your top 10 products by margin. That means you can see at a glance which items are actually making you money, not just which ones are moving the most units.

Multi-channel sales tracking (Etsy, own store, wholesale, in-person)

If you sell through more than one channel, the Sales sheet tags every transaction with a channel from a dropdown list, and the Dashboard rolls those up into a bar chart of sales by channel. That lets you compare, for example, how your Etsy shop is performing against your own site or a wholesale account without maintaining separate spreadsheets for each.

This is a gap in most of what's out there: free tools and Etsy-purchased trackers typically log a single undifferentiated sales feed, so a maker selling on Etsy, in person at craft fairs, and to a couple of wholesale accounts has no built-in way to see which channel is actually profitable. Software that does offer channel sync charges a monthly subscription for it; this template gives you the channel breakdown in the file you already own.

Automatic reorder alerts with supplier lead time

Each product carries a reorder threshold and a supplier lead time in days. The template compares your trailing 30-day sales velocity against current stock to flag a status of OK, REORDER NOW, or ORDER BY a specific date — calculated as today's date plus your projected days until stockout, minus the lead time. The Dashboard surfaces every item that needs attention in a single alerts table.

That's a meaningful step up from a binary low-stock flag. Most free and paid inventory spreadsheets tell you a number is low; this one tells you the actual date to place the order so you don't run out while you're waiting on a shipment.

How this compares to free Microsoft, Smartsheet, and Etsy templates

Microsoft and Smartsheet's free inventory templates are solid for a basic stock count: a product list, maybe a low-stock filter. What they don't do is calculate profit — there's no cost-of-goods field tied to a margin formula, and no channel breakdown, because they're built as generic list templates rather than a small-business reporting tool.

The Etsy-purchased trackers we looked at are closer to a real business tool but still stop at stock and sales; none of them calculate gross margin per product or segment revenue by sales channel. Reorder logic, where it exists at all, is a simple low/in-stock label rather than a date tied to your supplier's actual lead time.

This template's differentiator is combining the profit and channel reporting a growing seller actually needs with the reorder math that prevents stockouts, in a single file that opens identically whether you're on Excel or Google Sheets — no macros, no plugin, no Excel-only dashboard that breaks when a customer opens it on a Mac.

Excel vs Google Sheets, and who this template is for

You get two builds of the same file: one saved as .xlsx for Excel, one formatted for Google Sheets, both using the same SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, INDEX/MATCH, and IFERROR formulas so the calculations match exactly. Pick whichever tool your business already runs on; there's no feature you lose by choosing Sheets over Excel or vice versa.

It's built for small retailers, handmade sellers, and Etsy shop owners who are past tracking stock on paper or in their head but aren't ready to pay for inventory software. If you're selling through more than one channel and want to know which products and channels are actually profitable, not just which ones are in stock, this is the level of detail a spreadsheet can reasonably give you.