How do you calculate what a spreadsheet costs?

Three costs, all from your own figures: time spent hunting for stock that is not where the record says, hours spent on the month-end count, and shipments that went short or wrong because the record was wrong. No industry averages are used.

Do I need to give an email address?

No. The calculator runs in your browser, asks for nothing, and stores nothing.

When should I keep the spreadsheet?

If the number comes out under a few hundred dollars a month, software costs more than the problem. Under roughly 300 SKUs it usually does, because one person can hold that in their head.

Warebin

FREENo email required

What is the spreadsheet actually costing you?

The spreadsheet is free, and that is the whole problem with arguing about it. Anyone who wants to sell you something has to claim it is costing you money, so the claim gets discounted to zero and the conversation ends. Fair enough.

So put your own numbers in. Nothing here is pre-filled with an industry average, because we do not have one. If it comes out small, it comes out small, and the page will say so.

Times a week someone hunts for something

It is not where the system said, or nobody knows where it is.

Minutes each hunt takes

Walking there, looking, asking someone, walking back.

Loaded hourly cost of whoever walks

Wage plus tax and overhead, not the take-home.

Hours spent on the month-end count

Everyone, added up. Include the arguing afterwards.

Short or wrong shipments in a normal month

Only the ones where the record said you had it and you did not.

What one of those costs you

The credit, the reship, the call. Your number, not ours.

What it costs you

$890a month

$10,681 a year

Hunting for stock$20220 hunts a week x 5 min at $28/h
The month-end count$44816 hours at $28/h
Shipments that went wrong$2404 a month at $60 each

$890 a month is more than any of this category charges.

Before you buy anything: labelling your locations properly is free, takes a weekend, and removes a large share of the first line above. That method is written up here and works without buying anything.

Every number above is yours. We do not put an industry average in here because we do not have one, and a made-up figure would be worth less than your own guess.

Why these three

Most attempts to cost a spreadsheet stop at data entry, which is the smallest of the costs and the easiest to dismiss: everyone knows typing is fast. The three above are the ones that actually accumulate, and the third is usually the one that decides it.

Of the 482 posts in our corpus that described a real, unresolved inventory problem, 65 named a spreadsheet as the thing they were running on. That is the most common answer to “what are you using now?”, more common than any software product. It is a keyword match over free text, so treat it as a floor rather than a measurement.

There is a fourth cost with no formula: what it costs that one person is the index. If losing them would mean losing track of the warehouse, that is not a number, but it is the reason most people eventually move.

W-01Who wrote this

We build the thing that replaces the spreadsheet.

Warebin tracks which physical shelf each item is on: receive, put away, find, pick in walking order, count. From $149 a month, unlimited users, no setup fee and no sales call. You should weigh the calculator above knowing that.

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