This won’t surprise you: I didn’t write this blog in Excel. And with good reason—it’s a spreadsheet program. So, why are so many retail brands continuing to rely on it for so many things, including their inventory management?

Beware Excel encroachment

I like a VLOOKUP, a CONCATENATE and a COUNTIF as much as the next guy—I spent 5 years at Louis Vuitton and Dior, grinding through manual spreadsheets across thousands of SKUs— and don’t get me wrong, Excel absolutely has a place in the process. 

But it’s time retailers wised up to the pitfalls of Excel encroachment. It’s not a communication tool, it’s not a reporting dashboard. It’s for spreadsheets. Margins are too tight for using the wrong tool to do the job— it’s profit or perish.

Skill level: Macros master

Maybe you’re thinking: sure, but this doesn’t apply to me—I’m an Excel genius. I believe you, but it does. 

I’ve worked alongside people with crazy Excel skills. And with skills comes the ability to paper over the cracks and compensate for the limitations of the program. Because they can, they do. But that doesn’t mean they should.  

Maybe you just feel comfortable with the familiar. You know where you are with Excel (a trusty companion to many of us for years) and the legacy master spreadsheets that are “just the way we do it”. Or are you suffering some sort of spreadsheet Stockholm Syndrome?—your special psychological bond developed through hours spent captive in file after file. Either way, it’s time to snap out of it.

Using manual spreadsheets for inventory management is like trying to chop down a tree with a penknife. There are better, more powerful, and intuitive ways to go about the task of inventory management.

Retailers using autone to tackle their inventory management challenges report up to a 55% reduction in inventory levels, a 25% increase in forecasting accuracy, and 30% increase in sales.

Still not convinced?

Well, what happens to your pristine spreadsheet once it’s out in the wild? 

Formulas, formatting, frustrations.

Sending a fully formatted Excel spreadsheet to the uninitiated is like handing over the nuclear codes to a child—it’ll probably be fine as long as they don’t touch anything…

But, of course, they’ve got to just input some values here and there, quickly copy that cell, drag that over… and, yep, they’ve f*cked it. 

So quickly your spreadsheet can become useless, or even damaging, when those errors impact what’s supposedly your one source of truth. 

That’s why retailers are turning to a dedicated inventory management platform like autone—they can’t afford to let easily avoidable mistakes impact the bottom line. 

Objectives over perspectives

It’s easy to assume everyone’s speaking the same language when it comes to spreadsheets. It’s data after all—it’s universal. But perspectives can have a massive impact on decisions. It can be like talking about completely different things with people from supply chain, merchandising, and retail—even when it’s the exact same product.

So is everyone on board with your single source of truth or does subjectivity—or worse, scepticism of what’s in the cells—undermine your spreadsheet’s credibility?

autone’s AI forecasting and intuitive suggestions, contextualized by confidence scores, do away with disputes around data and leapfrog retailers straight into decision making at scale.

Offline and off track

Want to know what kills a good spreadsheet? Offline mode. And everyone’s doing it all the time.

What a way to undermine your efforts. No live data—and the second someone changes something your version is out of date. It's a mess. 

With autone, inventory management admin becomes automated and your teams can focus on the value-add, instead of wading through the volume, trying in vain to make a difference.

The right tool for the job

Savvy retailers are interrogating every part of their set up to best position themselves to weather the current trading climate. And with that even the spreadsheet stalwart, Excel, has to come under scrutiny.

When it comes to inventory management, it’s time to get serious about using the right tool for the job. autone exists as a result of our founders suffering firsthand the nightmares of manual inventory management. We developed the solution to escape the constraints of spreadsheet cells and, well, excel.

And you can too.

This is the fourth post in our latest Profit or Perish series where we uncover the key retail trends that’ll dominate 2025. Watch this space for more predictions coming soon.