Software recommendations vor microbusiness
Greetings... hoping someone can suggest a solution to this problem. It seems like a fairly simple problem that ought to be common, but most of what I'm seeing is overkill to the nth degree.
I live in a small town in the northern Philippines; it's a bit of a center for outdoor sports. 2.5 years ago my wife and I started selling outdoor clothing as an adjunct to a white water rafting business. Today that's become 2 small shops in 2 different towns selling outdoor clothing and equipment. Roughly 200 products, roughly $40k in inventory value. 2 employees, one in each store. Purely retail, customers walk in and buy. Average single sale is in the $25-30 range. Business is seasonal, ranges from around $8000/mo in sales in high season to half of that in low.
This is not my main line of work (obviously) and I'm not full time on it. We haven't taken profit out, everything goes back into new inventory (started with $5k worth). It's sort of in "see how it grows" mode, we have an option of expanding to a larger market (nearby town) but the upgrade in time and effort would be considerable.
I keep an Excel database of inventory, but everything is manually entered. It's grown to the point where that's a hassle, to say the least.
What I want is to keep that inventory list but be able to simply, quickly enter all merchandise coming in from suppliers and merchandise moving between stores. I need to be able to enter daily sales, ideally with a simple report form. This can be done manually, at this point the size of it doesn't justify a full POS system.
The main purpose is to keep a running count of inventory as a basis for ordering new merchandise, and to be able to generate reports to compare with physical counts as a way of monitoring potential theft. Being able to generate some basic reports on sales patterns, margins, non-performing merchandise etc would be useful.
Is there a simple software package that will perform these functions without burying them in a tidal wave of sophisticated capabilities that we don't need? Free would be great but I don't mind paying for something, as long as it's not hugely expensive and it's what we need. Don't want to pay for something pointless.
I do NOT want something that wants to register sales by generating purchase orders and invoices: this is retail, typical customer buys 1-3 items.
Alternatively, if there's a way to do this easily within Excel, that would work as well, if it's friendly to fairly basic users.
All ideas welcome, thanks in advance.
