Spreadsheet or app?

Most resellers track inventory in a spreadsheet, and for a lot of them that's genuinely the right answer. Here's when it stops being.

We give away a free spreadsheet too — link at the bottom.

What a spreadsheet does well

• It's free, and it's yours forever
• You can change anything. Add a column, rename a tab, no permission needed
• Nothing to learn. You already know how it works
• No subscription to forget about

Those are real advantages and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

Where it starts costing you

It isn't in the booth with you

You're holding something at a flea market and your records are on a laptop at home. So you guess, or you write it on your hand, or you tell yourself you'll remember. A cost you guessed at is worse than useless at tax time.

You can't share it

Source with a partner and one of you owns the file while the other texts details over. Google Sheets helps, but two people editing the same row on phones in different shops is not a good time.

It starts over every January

Most people begin a fresh one each year, so last year's history lives in another file, and an item bought in November and sold in February spans both.

Nothing tells you what needs doing

Sold on eBay but still live on Poshmark? Bought something six weeks ago and never listed it? A spreadsheet will never mention either.

The deductions you forget

This is the expensive one. Mileage to and from sourcing is deductible, and at IRS rates a few sourcing trips a week adds up to hundreds of dollars a year. Almost nobody tracks it in a spreadsheet, because it means opening a laptop after every trip.

Photos live somewhere else

Your item records are in one place and the photos are in your camera roll, matched only by memory.

Side by side

	Spreadsheet	Resale Inventory
Cost	Free	$19 a month
Change it however you like	Yes	Within reason
Works in the booth	Not really	Yes
Two people at once	Awkward	Yes
Photos with the item	No	Yes
Tells you what needs doing	No	Yes
Mileage tracking	If you're disciplined	Built in
Carries over each year	Usually not	Yes
Pallet cost splitting	Manual and fiddly	Automatic

The honest maths

$19 a month is $228 a year. If tracking mileage properly recovers a few hundred dollars of deductions you'd otherwise miss, it pays for itself on that alone — before counting the time.

If you're doing ten items a month, it won't, and you should keep your spreadsheet.