Managing Your Small Business Inventory With InFlow Inventory

It’s no easy task for a business to manage inventory. In addition to tracking the actual number of products in inventory, you deal with customer orders, purchase orders and re-ordering stock. This review of inFlow Inventory is for the business owner or executive who is ready to move beyond the spreadsheet.

Manage Inventory with inFlow Inventory

inFlow Inventory comes in three flavors: Free, regular and premium. We’ll focus on the free edition, of course, and it differs from many of my reviews in that it is not a web-based solution. It is software that you download. But since you can use the free version with up to 100 products, it is better (in my mind) than the 30 or 45-day trials you get with web-based software. The paid editions are $299 and $499 per license, respectively.

I have been working on a small eCommerce project and dealing with tracking product inventory. Of course, I started out using a spreadsheet. But that quickly got cumbersome, so I went searching for an easy-to-use solution. That’s how I found inFlow and gave it a test spin.

Once downloaded and installed, it was a piece of cake. Since I had 107 products to load, I quickly went looking for the “import” tool and found it intuitive and comprehensive. I could map all my product data to the inFlow system and it worked perfectly after I remembered that I had to get rid of 7 products for the free edition. But this was no problem for my test needs.

What I Really Like:

• Make small business look big: Easily produce sophisticated business documents such as invoices, purchase orders, sales orders, receipts, shipping documents. All customized to your needs and look/feel.
• Intuitive dashboard instantly shows outstanding orders, a top 5 list (which you can see in the screenshot below, although this is pre-sales, thus the flatline) and has a customizable graph of cash flow, sales, profits and costs. 

• Auto Backup. It is a simple thing, but it automatically backs up your data. You can set it for whatever interval works for you.
• Less time on manual entry with intelligent features such as the “auto fill” button and the one click purchase order option when low stock is detected (which is half the reason most would want to use it – know when you’re running low on something).  Plus, inFlow is barcode-capable, too.
• All product information in one place including locations, pictures, prices and categories.

What I Would Like to See:

• Some user help in the main dashboard about connecting to my eBay (or Etsy) storefront. They do have a help desk support thread with how-to information on downloading transactions from eBay and Etsy, but I had to search it out on my own.
• QuickBooks integration. Some sort of automatic integration with the dominant financial account software would be great. For now, integration with QuickBooks (or any other software) is manually through exporting inFlow data and inputting into QuickBooks via CSV.  They do have a help sheet.

InFlow focuses on the small business owner with 10 or less employees in wholesale, retail or manufacturing. The site and reviews show that the software is used by over 315,000 businesses in over 60 countries – that’s a solid footprint.

If you’re in the market for moving past a spreadsheet for managing product inventory, take a closer look at inFlow.

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