An inventory database is crucial for both physical stores and e-commerce businesses. It keeps track of stock levels, product details, and supplier information, serving as a central source of truth for inventory management. Building a well-structured inventory database can improve your operations and reduce errors.
You might not know where to start, but you’ve come to the right place. This step-by-step guide will show you how to build an inventory database so you can forget the days of lost inventory and inaccurate tracking.
Let’s go ahead and learn how we can develop an inventory database. Scroll down to access a free template application that stores data about products, inventory and reorder levels.
An inventory database is essential for managing your stock efficiently. It helps in tracking product availability, managing orders, forecasting demand, and ensuring that you never run out of stock or overstock. By having a centralized system, you can ensure data consistency and make informed product decisions.
An inventory database stores detailed information or attributes about items in your inventory, such as item name, weight, color, material, size, price, discount levels, minimum order quantity, country of origin, images, category, description, packaging information, margin, production cost, supplier details, and variations.
Depending on your industry, your list of inventory attributes might include certifications (e.g., “certified organic,” “GMO-free”), sensory characteristics (e.g., “sweet,” “soft”), ingredients, or marketing claims (e.g., “long-lasting,” “top-rated,” “popular choice”).
For instance, imagine you manage an e-commerce business that sells office supplies. On platforms like Shopify, your inventory items, such as pens, notebooks, and folders, can have various attributes and variations, such as price, color, size, and material quality. However, platforms like Shopify might not allow you to store extensive information such as granular item IDs, suppliers, inputs (materials or ingredients), production cost, margin, or required packaging materials.
This is where your inventory database becomes essential: it serves as a comprehensive, searchable database that stores all attributes about your inventory items, enabling efficient management and detailed tracking of all necessary information.
More often than not, businesses set up and maintain their inventory databases in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
While these spreadsheet-based solutions are a natural starting point, especially for smaller businesses, a word of caution: these spreadsheets tend to have a life of their own and typically create problems, such as:
1. Version Confusion:
Different departments or users have their local copy of the spreadsheet (“InventoryDatabase_NEW”, “Inventory Database – v2.1”, “Old Inventory Database – DO NOT USE”, etc.)
2. Lack of Version and Access Control:
Without clear ownership or version control, changes made by staff can be lost or duplicated, especially if the person responsible for updates leaves the company and a new person takes over.
3. Data Inconsistencies:
Comments, highlights, and overwrites (how about we mark out-of-stock products in red?).
4. Security Breaches:
Spreadsheets cannot be easily secured or protected from unauthorized access. Excel or Google Sheets do not directly support user roles, authentication, or granular access control.
Setting up your inventory database as a spreadsheet more often than not defeats its purpose of becoming your single source of truth.
Instead, you end up constantly fighting fires and cleaning up spreadsheets. That’s why we recommend creating a proper product database.
Building an inventory database usually requires technical knowledge that someone running an e-commerce or factory operation might not have. For instance, you’d need a substantial understanding of database languages like SQL, not to mention the frontend development for user interaction.
This complexity often leads small-scale e-commerce operations, manufacturers, and distributors to neglect building an inventory database because they simply don’t have the technical expertise or the time to create it from scratch.
This is where database builders like Five come in. Five is an online database builder specifically designed to make creating an inventory database much faster.
Creating an inventory database with Five won’t be entirely effortless, but it will be significantly easier than spending 60+ hours learning various coding frameworks and languages.
With Five, you can set up your database in minutes, and a user-friendly interface is automatically generated based on your database. You can easily import your existing data from Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV files, allowing you to get started quickly.
Five also offers the flexibility to create custom business logic with code, generate stocktake or inventory PDF reports, and visualize your data through custom charts. Additionally, you can set up email notifications for low stock items, ensuring you stay organized and never run out of essential inventory.
Get free access to Five here and start building the inventory database to improve your operations.
Start by compiling a complete list of all attributes relevant to your inventory. Think about what matters to your business, your customers, and your employees. Your inventory database should be a “single source of truth” about your items, so ensure it’s as comprehensive as possible.
Here are some must-have attributes typically included:
In addition, add inventory information to your database, such as:
To determine the right attributes, listen to your customers. What are the most common questions they ask about your inventory items?
Next, wherever possible, define choices for each attribute. This step introduces consistency into your database.
For example, if your items come in different widths, decide whether to express width in centimeters, millimeters, or inches. If you need to cater to both American and European customers, store both measurements but in separate columns.
Similarly, for colors, establish predefined choices like green, blue, and yellow. If you need to be more specific (e.g., dark green, forest green, olive green), define these variations as well.
The benefits of defining choices include:
With these first two steps, your inventory database table might look something like this:
Item Name | Description | Color | Weight | Size | Supplier | SKU | Price |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Item A | Detailed description of Item A | Black | 350g | Large | Supplier1 | 12345678 | $10.99 |
Item B | Detailed description of Item B | Blue | 500g | Medium | Supplier2 | 23456789 | $15.99 |
When it’s time to create your inventory database, many people start with tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. While these spreadsheet-based solutions can be convenient for smaller businesses, they often lead to significant issues as your operations grow. Here are some common problems associated with using spreadsheets:
Setting up your inventory database in a spreadsheet can ultimately defeat the purpose of having a single, reliable source of truth. Instead of efficient inventory management, you end up constantly managing and cleaning up multiple spreadsheets.
Explore this sample inventory database, created in just 15 minutes, featuring 13 inventory attributes in an intuitive web interface. Feel free to add more items to the database and navigate through the application.
Here’s the database schema for our application.
The inventory database schema consists of several interconnected tables:
Each table holds specific information, such as product, reorder levels, supplier contact details and product categories, ensuring a comprehensive and organized structure. The relationships between these tables facilitate efficient inventory management.
If you think building a comprehensive web app like this is beyond your capabilities, think again. Here are the steps we took to build this web app using Five:
Create a Customizable Inventory Database:
Design the User Form:
Define Attribute Display Types:
Add a Simple Inventory Dashboard:
Optional: Secure the Application:
To build an inventory database similar to (or more advanced than) our sample, follow these steps:
Set Up Your Database:
Once your database table has fields for each inventory attribute, the next step is to create a user-friendly form. Here’s how you can do it using Five’s Form Wizard:
Create a New Table in Your Application:
Launch a Ready-to-Use Web Application:
Preview and Launch:
To build your custom inventory database with Five, sign up for free access and start the process. If you need assistance, visit our forum to get help from our application development experts as you add more features to your inventory database.
By following these steps, you can create a robust and scalable inventory management system tailored to your business needs, all while using the tools provided inside of Five.