Wholesale Inventory Management Spreadsheet — Free App

The phone rings at a distribution company and it's the biggest account asking the only question that matters: "How many cases can you get on a truck Friday?" The honest answer requires three numbers — what's physically in the warehouses, what's already committed to other customers, and what's left to promise — and at most small distributors, those numbers live in a Google Sheet that one ops person guards like a ledger.

The sheet is genuinely the right tool for the messy parts. ERPs choke on the reality of wholesale: the pallet reserved for a customer who orders monthly but hasn't confirmed, the case-versus-each conversion that differs by product line, the backorder that's half-shipped. But the sheet has a bottleneck problem. When the ops person is at lunch, nobody can quote availability. When two reps promise the same pallet to two accounts, the sheet finds out last.

Full wholesale inventory suites start around $325 a month and typically demand you abandon the sheet entirely. There's a middle path: the sheet stays the ledger, and AI builds a free web dashboard the whole team can read — the approach from our foundational inventory dashboard guide, scaled up to multi-warehouse wholesale.

Step 1: Start With the Allocation Sheet

The classic distributor layout — one row per SKU per warehouse — is exactly the input this needs:

Customer allocation tabs, inbound PO tabs, unit-conversion tables — keep them all. Nothing gets flattened or migrated.

Step 2: Set Up a Free Account

Create yours at lovespreadsheets.com. The build and day-to-day use cost nothing; the paid tier matters once you want individual logins for sales reps or the dashboard served from your company's domain.

Step 3: Write the Brief Your Ops Person Would Give

Take the Dashboard template. If a WMS or ERP holds part of the picture, an API key from it lets the dashboard pull those counts live next to the sheet — useful, not mandatory. Then describe the operation in distributor language:

"We distribute beverages from warehouses in Memphis and Dallas. This sheet tracks on-hand, committed, and available cases per SKU per warehouse, plus backorders and reorder points. Build a dashboard with available-to-promise per SKU across both sites, per-warehouse detail underneath, and a standing list of every backordered line by customer."

Then hand the phone calls to a chatbot:

"Add a chatbot our reps can ask 'how many cases of sparkling water can I promise for Friday?' or 'what's backordered for our top 5 accounts?'"

Put three more items in the brief:

• Reorder alert emails per warehouse, so Memphis dropping through its reorder point doesn't hide behind a healthy Dallas number
• A daily snapshot logged to a history tab — committed-versus-available over time shows which accounts habitually tie up stock they don't take
• A combined-plus-per-site view for every SKU, so one screen answers both "do we have it?" and "where is it?"

Expect a clarifying question or two, then a build time in the 15–20 minute range.

Step 4: Availability Without the Bottleneck

The team gets a URL where available-to-promise is a number on a screen, not a favor from the ops desk. Reps quote Friday shipments while the customer is still on the line, the backorder list updates itself as the sheet changes, and each warehouse manager watches their own reorder flags. The sheet keeps its job as the system of record — it just stops being the only window into it.

Why Distributors Keep the Sheet

Committed stock logic is house-specific. Which customers get soft allocations, when a hold expires, how cases roll up to pallets — your rules live in your sheet, and the dashboard inherits them instead of forcing a generic model.

One ledger, many readers. The failure mode was never the data; it was six people needing it and one person holding it. Live sync turns the private ledger into shared visibility without adding a second source of truth.

Reorder points scale past memory. Two warehouses times four hundred SKUs is too many thresholds for anyone's head. In a column, with alerts attached, they all fire on time.

Common Questions from Distributors

Can it compute available-to-promise for us? Yes — describe the formula (on hand minus committed, per warehouse and combined) and it becomes a live column on the dashboard.

We sell in cases and pallets. Which does it show? Whichever you ask for — including both, if your conversion factors are in the sheet.

Can big accounts get their own availability page? With paid team logins you can give a customer a scoped view of just the SKUs they buy.

Build Yours

Point lovespreadsheets.com at the allocation sheet your ops desk already lives in, describe your warehouses and your promise rules, and build. Next time the big account calls about Friday's truck, anyone who picks up can answer.