Create an Inventory Database In 3 Steps

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dom | Five.Co

A Quick & Easy Guide on How to Create an Inventory Database

An inventory database is crucial for both physical stores and e-commerce businesses. It keeps track of stock levels, product details, and supplier information, serving as a central source of truth for inventory management. Building a well-structured inventory database can improve your operations and reduce errors.

You might not know where to start, but you've come to the right place. This step-by-step guide will show you how to build an inventory database so you can forget the days of lost inventory and inaccurate tracking.

Why Build an Inventory Database?

An inventory database is essential for managing your stock efficiently. It helps in tracking product availability, managing orders, forecasting demand, and ensuring that you never run out of stock or overstock. By having a centralized system, you can ensure data consistency and make informed product decisions.

What Is an Inventory Database?

An inventory database stores detailed information or attributes about items in your inventory, such as item name, weight, color, material, size, price, discount levels, minimum order quantity, country of origin, images, category, description, packaging information, margin, production cost, supplier details, and variations.

Depending on your industry, your list of inventory attributes might include certifications (e.g., "certified organic," "GMO-free"), sensory characteristics (e.g., "sweet," "soft"), ingredients, or marketing claims (e.g., "long-lasting," "top-rated," "popular choice").

For instance, imagine you manage an e-commerce business that sells office supplies. On platforms like Shopify, your inventory items, such as pens, notebooks, and folders, can have various attributes and variations, such as price, color, size, and material quality. However, platforms like Shopify might not allow you to store extensive information such as granular item IDs, suppliers, inputs (materials or ingredients), production cost, margin, or required packaging materials.

This is where your inventory database becomes essential: it serves as a comprehensive, searchable database that stores all attributes about your inventory items, enabling efficient management and detailed tracking of all necessary information.

How to Create an Inventory Database in 3 Steps

Building an inventory database usually requires technical knowledge that someone running an e-commerce or factory operation might not have. For instance, you'd need a substantial understanding of database languages like SQL, not to mention the frontend development for user interaction.

This complexity often leads small-scale e-commerce operations, manufacturers, and distributors to neglect building an inventory database because they simply don't have the technical expertise or the time to create it from scratch.

This is where database builders like Five come in. Five is an online database builder specifically designed to make creating an inventory database much faster.

Creating an inventory database with Five won't be entirely effortless, but it will be significantly easier than spending 60+ hours learning various coding frameworks and languages.

With Five, you can set up your database in minutes, and a user-friendly interface is automatically generated based on your database. You can easily import your existing data from Excel, Google Sheets, or CSV files, allowing you to get started quickly.

Five also offers the flexibility to create custom business logic with code, generate stocktake or inventory PDF reports, and visualize your data through custom charts. Additionally, you can set up email notifications for low stock items, ensuring you stay organized and never run out of essential inventory.

Get free access to Five here and start building the inventory database to improve your operations.

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Step 1: List Out All Product and Inventory Attributes

Start by compiling a complete list of all attributes relevant to your inventory. Think about what matters to your business, your customers, and your employees. Your inventory database should be a "single source of truth" about your items, so ensure it's as comprehensive as possible.

Here are some must-have attributes typically included:

• Item Name
• Description
• Price
• Materials or Ingredients
• Size(s)
• Weight
• Color(s)
• SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
• Supplier Details
• Minimum Order Quantity
• Packaging Information
• Country of Origin

In addition, add inventory information to your database, such as:

• Current Inventory
• Units on Order
• Reordering Level

To determine the right attributes, listen to your customers. What are the most common questions they ask about your inventory items?

Step 2: Define Choices for Each Attribute

Next, wherever possible, define choices for each attribute. This step introduces consistency into your database.

For example, if your items come in different widths, decide whether to express width in centimeters, millimeters, or inches. If you need to cater to both American and European customers, store both measurements but in separate columns.

Similarly, for colors, establish predefined choices like green, blue, and yellow. If you need to be more specific (e.g., dark green, forest green, olive green), define these variations as well.

The benefits of defining choices include:

• Data Consistency: Ensures uniform data entry.
• Clean Data: Prevents errors and inconsistencies.
• Easier Data Management: Simplifies sorting and filtering data.

With these first two steps, your inventory database table might look something like this:

Step 3: Creating Your Inventory Database

When it's time to create your inventory database, many people start with tools like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. While these spreadsheet-based solutions can be convenient for smaller businesses, they often lead to significant issues as your operations grow. Here are some common problems associated with using spreadsheets:

• Version Confusion: Different departments or users might have their own local copy of the spreadsheet, leading to multiple versions like "InventoryDatabase_NEW," "Inventory Database – v2.1," "Old Inventory Database – DO NOT USE," etc.
• Lack of Version Control: Without clear ownership or version control, changes made by different team members can be lost or duplicated, especially if the person responsible for updates leaves the company.
• Data Inconsistencies: Comments, highlights, and manual updates can lead to a cluttered and error-prone spreadsheet. For example, marking out-of-stock items in red can easily be overlooked or misinterpreted.

Setting up your inventory database in a spreadsheet can ultimately defeat the purpose of having a single, reliable source of truth. Instead of efficient inventory management, you end up constantly managing and cleaning up multiple spreadsheets.

Inventory Database: Free Sample Application

Explore this sample inventory database, created in just 15 minutes, featuring 13 inventory attributes in an intuitive web interface. Feel free to add more items to the database and navigate through the application.

The Inventory Database Schema

Here's the database schema for our application.

The inventory database schema consists of several interconnected tables:

1. At its heart is the Product table, storing information about products and their attributes;
2. The Category table helps us make sense of our products and the categories they belong to.
3. The Supplier table is another critical piece of our database schema: it lets us associate products with suppliers and allows us to notify our business partners when inventory runs low.

Each table holds specific information, such as product, reorder levels, supplier contact details and product categories, ensuring a comprehensive and organized structure. The relationships between these tables facilitate efficient inventory management.

The Inventory Database Schema in Five

If you think building a comprehensive web app like this is beyond your capabilities, think again. Here are the steps we took to build this web app using Five:

Steps to Build the Web App

Create a Customizable Inventory Database:

• We started by defining the fields (attributes) we wanted to store in our database using Five’s Table Wizard, a user-friendly, point-and-click database design tool. This required just a few clicks.

Design the User Form:

• We then created the form that our users can interact with, again using just a few clicks. For example, we added a drop-down for the product category to ensure data is categorized properly, which helps maintain data cleanliness and consistency.

Define Attribute Display Types:

• We set the price as a numeric value (a currency field) and the description as a longer text field. These display types were easily defined within Five.

Add a Simple Inventory Dashboard:

• We also added a basic dashboard to provide insights into stock levels and prices. While this is a simple example, a more sophisticated dashboard could be created using the same data from our inventory database.

Optional: Secure the Application:

• For security, we could have made the application login-protected with just a single click, adding a login screen and assigning user roles. However, to allow you to see the app, we decided to keep it public.

How to Build Your Inventory Database

To build an inventory database similar to (or more advanced than) our sample, follow these steps:

Set Up Your Database:

• Sign up for free access to Five.
• Create a database table with fields for all your inventory attributes. Here’s an example of how our database table looks in Five.

Once your database table has fields for each inventory attribute, the next step is to create a user-friendly form. Here’s how you can do it using Five’s Form Wizard:

Create a New Table in Your Application:

• Use the Form Wizard in Five to set up a new table in your application. Follow the documentation provided to understand how the Form Wizard works.

Launch a Ready-to-Use Web Application:

• With just one database table and one form, Five enables you to create an entire ready-to-use web application for managing your inventory. This application includes a search bar and filtering feature, which is incredibly useful as your inventory catalog grows.

Preview and Launch:

• To preview your application, you can launch it to the cloud with a single click. This allows you to see how your inventory database will function in a live environment.

Get Started with Five Today

To build your custom inventory database with Five, sign up for free access and start the process. If you need assistance, visit our forum to get help from our application development experts as you add more features to your inventory database.

By following these steps, you can create a robust and scalable inventory management system tailored to your business needs, all while using the tools provided inside of Five.

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Dom | Five.Co