Before you price a new inventory system, price the spreadsheet
Before you price a new inventory system, price the spreadsheet. Count what the drift cost you last quarter.
Owner-run businesses on spreadsheets get told they have outgrown them. Sometimes that is true. Often the spreadsheet is fine and nobody owns the count. Three people update it, one of them on Fridays, and the number on screen is from whenever someone last remembered.
A new system will not fix that by itself. It moves the same habits into software that costs more and is harder to change.
So put a number on it. How many times last quarter did you run out of something you thought you had? How many rush orders, how much stock written off, how many hours spent reconciling? Put a dollar figure next to each.
Then ask who is responsible for the count being right, and when it gets checked against the shelf.
If the drift costs $4,000 a year, a $60,000 project is hard to justify, and a weekly count with one named owner may be the whole fix. If it costs $80,000, you now have the number that sizes the project, and the question for every vendor: how exactly will this bring that number down?