Getting help to remember what I sell at my home food shop
Getting help to remember what I sell at my home food shop
Hi guys, I have a small home-based food business. My friend made me a big sheet to collect all my orders for different kinds of products every single day. But finding them and typing them into an Excel sheet takes too much time. I know computers are cool, but I'm not sure how to make an Excel form that adds up the total by date automatically. The problem is that right now, my data on his phone doesn't match what's in the real sheets. Some days he only shows me a few things, other times it looks like crazy details. Also, delivery charges are missing. If anyone could help out here so I can share a sample of the Excel sheet with him, I would be super happy to learn how to make this work for us.
You can use Quickbooks to track your products and services, make reports in Excel or PDF format, and save those files easily. Although Quickbooks is built like a register-based point-of-sale system so you get all the tasks done when you bill, it does need some setup first. You have to create separate categories for each product or service. It will also let you see if things are running low on stock as soon as you ask. I love how easy Quickbooks is with payments and especially great for small charges that cost less than $100. When people pay over about $1,000 though, the fee jumps up a lot.
Freshbooks? Quickbooks has some services related to this. There are many other options too. For making working forms in Excel, it might be too hard right now. I recommend starting with guides and tutorials that can be found here: Create Form in Excel for Data Entry | MyExcelOnline
Have you talked to your friend about making the spreadsheet better? I want to suggest adding a database instead. It's not much harder than the spreadsheet and lets you read data from other spreadsheets in new ways. Microsoft Access can make forms and reports using its own tables or existing spreadsheet tables. Spreadsheets work well but they get messy and take too long. You could build a simple form for inputting POS info to save that stuff into the right tables. Those tables then let you ask questions, sort things, or look at anything on the fly. Another good thing is if you have to do the same steps over and over again, a macro can run with just one click. Find someone who knows Access (the database part).
You can set up Quickbooks to track and figure out the cost of products and services, plus make reports that are easy to share as an Excel file or PDF. Quickbooks is meant like a register system where you do these things while taking money for items. Just remember you have to name every single item in your list so it knows if something is something you keep in stock, how much you have left, and when you need to check if something ran out. I really enjoy Quickbooks payment and especially work with small fees like that. When people pay big amounts (more than a thousand dollars), the system takes way too much of them.
My dad has always used QuickBooks to handle the accounting stuff for Mom's business. Now, there are so many online choices out there. You might be able to find some good templates or databases on the cloud to help with this.