How To Use a Fabric Inventory Spreadsheet: 8 Pro Tips

A great fabric store is all about variety. Offering a wide range of materials, styles, and colors is a surefire way to draw in eager customers who are itching to start their next big craft project. Unfortunately, that same variety of textiles is also what makes running a fabric store or quilt shop so complex.

Keeping track of fabric inventory is essential for keeping stores organized, improving the shopping experience, and reducing costs — but it can be easier said than done.

If you don’t have a system for keeping track of your stock, a fabric inventory spreadsheet can be a good starting point. In this blog, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about using a fabric inventory spreadsheet, along with bonus tips for improving your store inventory management.

Let’s dive in.

Why Tracking Inventory Is Essential for Quilt and Fabric Shops

Tracking inventory can seem tedious, especially for small shops in a niche space. However, not tracking inventory using a spreadsheet or inventory management software can lead to lost sales, disappointed customers, or people losing trust in your brand altogether.

Here are the top reasons why quilt and fabric shops should start tracking inventory today:

Avoid stockouts: Having an overview of your stock levels avoids the risk of running out of items when a customer needs them the most.
Spot sales trends: A holistic and unbiased view of your inventory helps you understand which items, styles, and fabric types are most popular, helping you make better stocking decisions.
Improve organization: A detailed record of where each item is located will improve customer service and avoid unnecessary reorders.
Improve financial decisions: It’s hard to reduce costs or set prices without an accurate view of your total inventory cost and profit margins. Tracking inventory is the first step towards optimizing your inventory levels.

An organized list of items is also an essential first step for selling your fabrics online, which is increasingly important for independent quilt shops.

Using a Fabric Inventory Spreadsheet: 8 Pro Tips

A spreadsheet can be a helpful and cost-effective tool for tracking fabric inventory, especially when starting a new business. While basic and more labor-intensive than dedicated inventory software, a spreadsheet helps you stay organized and help customers faster.

Here are eight pro tips to get the most out of your fabric inventory spreadsheet.

1. Pick the Right Tool

First things first: Pick what kind of spreadsheet you’re going to use. Generally speaking, most people use either Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Each has its pros and cons.

Google Sheets is cloud-based, meaning you can access it from anywhere you have an internet connection. It also allows users to collaborate and update it simultaneously. However, it’s not as powerful as Excel when it comes to doing advanced calculations and takes some additional setup to work offline.

On the other hand, Microsoft Excel is widely used in the business world and has the potential to integrate with other services. Excel is considered the gold standard when it comes to data analysis, offering many ways to organize data for sorting, filtering, and advanced calculations. Microsoft also offers cloud-based editing and up to 5 GB of storage for free accounts.

2. Include Essential Information

Once you choose the right tool, it’s time to review your inventory and set up your spreadsheet. Make sure to include the essential information you need to keep track of inventory, such as:

Stock-keeping unit (SKU)
Fabric/item name
Designer or brand
Color*
Pattern*
Material*
Width
Location in store*
Yardage/quantity
Cost
Selling price (per unit, per yard, etc.)
Supplier

*Pro tip: For the asterisked items, it’s a good idea to use dropdown menus with predefined values. That way, you’ll avoid inconsistent item information that can make item lookup harder (e.g. listing items as “red,” instead of variations like “crimson” or “scarlet”)

Additionally, if you also sell equipment like sewing machines, you’ll want a column for serial numbers for serialized inventory tracking.

Including detailed information allows you to then filter your spreadsheet to quickly sort and find specific types of products, materials, and colors.

3. Regularly Update Your Spreadsheet

Building out your fabric inventory spreadsheet is only the first step. From there, you need to regularly update it to get an accurate view of your current stock levels.

At minimum, you should update your spreadsheet every day, reconciling your sales, returns, and any received invoices against your stock. Ideally, you update the spreadsheet every time you make a sale or receive an invoice to minimize errors.

Remember: Try to use the same names and categories your suppliers use on your spreadsheet to avoid confusion or accidental duplicates. If you want to make additional notes to help find certain items more easily, create a notes column.

4. Keep Things Consistent

Unless you’re the only person on staff at your quilt store, you’ll share your spreadsheet with multiple employees. Train your employees on how and when to update the spreadsheet to ensure everyone is using it the same way.

This is particularly important for fractional yardage sales. Make sure you’re consistent with how you write different lengths or units, so that it’s easy to reconcile inventory and sales.

Last, ensure your processes for adding new items or archiving old items are the same to avoid data entry errors and inconsistencies.

5. Use Formulas for Automatic Calculations

Once you create your spreadsheet, you have the ability to start doing some basic (or advanced) calculations on your inventory and sales performance.

Using your fabric inventory spreadsheet, you can run calculations to find out metrics like:

Total inventory value on hand
Profit margin calculations per item or supplier
Sales quantities over time
Stock aging analysis

…and more!

Depending on how comfortable you are using the formulas and calculations on a spreadsheet, you can use these numbers to gain insights into store performance and make better business decisions.

6. Keep a Separate Log for Transactions

In addition to your inventory spreadsheet, you want to keep a separate log for transactions. Your transaction log should include:

Transaction date
Transaction type (e.g. sale, return, purchase)
Item description (should match the item name on your fabric inventory spreadsheet)
Quantity (number of units, yards, etc.)
Unit price
Total transaction value
Customer or supplier name
Invoice or receipt number (to verify transactions)
Notes or comments

Not only will this help you keep detailed financial records for your business, you can also cross reference this data with your inventory to identify sales trends, cost of goods sold (COGS), and profit margins.

7. Back Up Your Spreadsheet

You’ve created a fully detailed, consistent, and well-organized spreadsheet. Better yet, you go above and beyond to update it after every sale and after receiving any invoice.

Then one day, out of the blue, your computer crashes, you lose internet access, the file gets corrupt — in other words, something goes very, very wrong. What do you do?

If you use a spreadsheet or any other manual inventory tracking, it’s essential to have a backup plan — literally and figuratively. Use a service like Dropbox or Google Drive to regularly back up any spreadsheets that are physically stored on a hard drive to ensure a stolen laptop or a power surge doesn’t wipe out your inventory list.

Similarly, if you’re working on Google Sheets or other cloud-based tools, ensure you have a way to access the spreadsheet and update it if the internet goes down.

8. Know Your Fabric Spreadsheet’s Limitations

As we’ve said, a spreadsheet is an excellent starting point for tracking inventory and infinitely better than having no system at all. However, knowing what a fabric inventory spreadsheet can and, more importantly, can’t do is important for assessing whether it will fit your store’s long-term goals.

Like Sew - Fabric Inventory Spreadsheets Pros & Cons

Creating and updating a spreadsheet is a lot of work. So, make sure the time and effort you spend on it is worth the benefits.

Start by asking yourself these questions:

Why do I want to make a fabric inventory spreadsheet in the first place? Is it to reduce errors, improve my store organization, reduce costs, or another reason entirely?
How much time can I afford per day to update inventory and transaction sheets?
Will I want to offer online sales in the future?
Does a spreadsheet support all the types of items I want to sell in my shop?

Remember: A spreadsheet may be cheaper than software (or free!), but like everything in business, it has its pros and cons. So, make sure running your business on a spreadsheet makes sense for your shop.

How a Modern POS System Simplifies Tracking Fabric Inventory

A spreadsheet is good for basic inventory management, but it’s also time-consuming, error-prone, and makes it harder for small business owners to deliver the convenient shopping experiences that customers expect.

Using a modern point of sale (POS) system with built-in inventory management helps small business owners by simplifying and automating many aspects of fabric inventory management.

Better yet, specialized solutions like Like Sew include industry-specific features for quilt and fabric shops, including:

Automated inventory tracking: See updates to inventory in real time every time you make a sale or receive an invoice, drastically reducing the need for manual data entry and reconciliation.
Fractional yardage management: Precisely track fractional yardage, down to 1/8 of a yard, making it easy to maintain accurate inventory records — especially when dealing with diverse fabric types and measurements.
Integrated vendor management: Track all supplier information in one place, including assigning multiple suppliers to a single item, ensuring you can quickly generate purchase orders when needed.
Streamlined receiving: Update inventory against invoices for quick and accurate restocking.
Barcode scanning and label printing: Print custom barcodes for every fabric type, so you can quickly ring up orders and speed up inventory audits.
Low stock alerts: Set stock alerts based on supplier lead times and average sales volume to optimize stock levels and avoid stockouts of popular items.
Visual reporting and insights: Leverage sales and inventory data to gain insights into bestsellers, peak hours, seasonal trends, profit margins, and more, empowering you to make better business decisions.
Pictures and customer history: Assign pictures to inventory items for easy reference and track customer purchase history to quickly answer questions and set up repeat orders.

Inventory management software isn’t free. However, by streamlining your daily processes and eliminating data entry, it has the potential to save you money in the long run.

Need a Better Way To Track Your Fabric Inventory?

With such a diverse range of styles, colors, and other attributes, getting a handle on fabric inventory is no small task. While a spreadsheet can be a good fit for businesses with small sales volume, it quickly becomes overwhelming as a business grows. Spreadsheets are also prone to data-entry errors, which can result in costly mistakes or a negative customer experience.

Don’t take chances with your business. A software solution that’s specially tailored to fit the needs of your business is the right way forward.

Trusted by quilt and sewing stores across the country, Like Sew has all the tools a small business needs to succeed, including industry-specific inventory tools, customizable customer loyalty, flexible payments, and more.

Schedule a demo today to see how Like Sew gives you a better way to manage your fabric inventory.