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You started tracking stock in a ruled notebook. It worked fine when you had 10 products and you were the only person selling. Now you carry 40 products in different sizes, three customers owe you money you can’t quite remember, and your staff member’s handwriting is borderline unreadable.
The notebook isn’t working anymore. But is Excel the answer? Or do you need proper software? It depends on where your business actually is.
Paper notebooks
Paper works if you sell fewer than 15 products, you run the shop alone, nothing you sell expires, and you don’t care about profit per product. Plenty of successful businesses started exactly like this. A notebook that does the job is nothing to apologise for.
The problems show up when the business grows.
You can’t search a notebook. If you need to know what you sold three Tuesdays ago, you’re flipping pages. Two staff members means two different handwriting styles and, inevitably, two different versions of reality. End-of-month stocktaking turns into an afternoon of adding columns by hand and hoping you don’t skip a row. And no notebook has ever sent anyone a low-stock warning.
Paper is fine until it isn’t. You’ll know when you’ve hit that point because you’ll start spending more time managing the notebook than managing the business.
Excel and Google Sheets
Excel gives you things paper can’t. You can search. You can use formulas. You can filter by product or date. Google Sheets lets your staff see the same file from their own phone. It’s free. For a lot of businesses, it’s a genuine upgrade.
But it has a ceiling, and most people hit it faster than they expect.
You have to build everything yourself. Product lists, sales logs, stock calculations, customer ledgers. Most people create one sheet, get it working, and then never touch the formulas again even as the business changes around them.
Stock doesn’t update on its own. When someone sells 500g of shea butter, that sale has to be manually subtracted from the stock sheet. If they forget (and they will forget), your numbers are wrong until the next physical count.
Excel also can’t connect a sale to a specific cost. If you bought shea butter at NGN3,500/kg in one batch and NGN4,200/kg in another, Excel has no idea which batch you just sold from. So your profit numbers are guesses.
And if two people are editing the same Google Sheet at the same time? Overwritten cells. Offline edits that don’t sync. Data you can’t trust.
Excel can do almost anything if you set it up right. The problem is that almost nobody sets it up right, and even when they do, it still needs a human to keep it updated manually.
When you need inventory software
If a few of these sound familiar, you’ve probably outgrown paper and spreadsheets:
- You sell 20+ products in multiple sizes (100g, 250g, 500g, 1kg)
- Staff members record sales alongside you
- Some of your products have expiry dates
- You charge different prices for retail, wholesale, and bulk buyers
- You need to know actual profit, not just total revenue
- Customers owe you money and you’ve lost track of the details
What inventory software does differently is handle the connections between things. A sale deducts stock automatically. The deduction comes from a specific batch, so your cost of goods is real, not averaged. Alerts go out when stock runs low or a batch is close to expiry. Customers have saved price tiers so the right price loads without you thinking about it. Invoices get generated and shared on WhatsApp. Staff can record sales without seeing your financial data. And the whole thing runs on your phone, no laptop needed at the shop.
Side by side:
| Paper | Excel | Inventory Software | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time stock levels | No | Manual updates | Automatic |
| Profit per product | No | Complex formulas | Built in |
| Batch expiry tracking | No | Manual | Automatic alerts |
| Multi-staff access | No | Fragile | Role-based |
| Price tiers (retail/wholesale/bulk) | From memory | Manual | Automatic |
| Invoicing + WhatsApp sharing | No | No | Built in |
| Works on phone | N/A | Clunky | Yes |
This is what we built Mayloo to do. The inventory math, the pricing, the bookkeeping. You just sell. See the full feature list.
Start with where you are
If you have fewer than 15 products and sell alone, paper is fine. Stick with it.
If you’ve outgrown paper but aren’t ready for software, a well-built spreadsheet can carry you for a while. Just know that you’ll be the one maintaining it.
But if you catch yourself spending more time reconciling stock and chasing debts than actually selling, that’s the sign. You need something built for the job.
Mayloo is free to try. Set up your products, record a sale, and see your actual profit. All from your phone.