LineraFlow vs running inventory in a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet is an excellent inventory system right up to one specific point: the first time two people needed the same number at the same time. Before that, a sheet is faster, cheaper and understood by everybody. After it, the errors are invisible.
That point is not a SKU count, which is why "how big are you" is the wrong question to open with. It is a moment: someone selling off a sheet at the counter while someone else receives against it in the back, or a customer collecting stock another order had already claimed. What makes the failure expensive is not that the number is wrong but that nobody can tell when it became wrong, and the first symptom is a person standing at a counter waiting for something that is not there. So this page is about the transition rather than about software features. The decision in front of you is which side of it you are already on, and the table below is written to help you place yourself rather than to sell you across.
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The transition, not the tool
Businesses rarely decide to leave a spreadsheet. They accumulate workarounds until the workarounds are the system: a second tab for committed stock, a colour convention for “do not sell this”, a rule that only one person touches the file after four o’clock. Each one is sensible on its own and together they are an inventory system with no audit trail and no enforcement.
The signal worth watching is not size. It is how often somebody has to ask a colleague whether a number is current.
What a sheet cannot be made to do
Some of the gaps below can be closed with enough spreadsheet skill. A column per location works. A committed-stock tab works. What cannot be added is enforcement: nothing stops the next person overwriting either of them, and nothing records that they did. Version history tells you the file changed, not that four units left the building.
That is the difference the table describes — not features a sheet lacks, but guarantees a file cannot make.
Where LineraFlow fits, and where it does not
One to five locations, catalogs up to 10,000 SKUs, orders arriving over a counter, a phone or a Shopify store. If you need lot, serial or expiry tracking for regulated stock, hard EDI onboarding with large wholesale partners, or you are a single-channel B2C seller who would be better served by a storefront platform, this is the wrong tool and a spreadsheet may genuinely still be the better of the two until you buy the right one.
Side by side
| LineraFlow | A spreadsheet | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs to run | $59/mo Starter plan, billed monthly, no one-time cost | No licence of its own You already have it. The cost is the hours spent reconciling it and the sales lost to a number that was wrong — neither of which appears on an invoice |
| Stock committed to an order but not yet collected | Yes Reserved separately from on-hand, so committed stock stops being sellable while staying on the shelf | No A cell holds one number. Committed and available have to be two columns somebody remembers to update, which is where the counter double-sale comes from |
| History of every stock change | Yes Append-only movement ledger — every receive, adjust and ship is recorded and never overwritten | No Last write wins and the previous value is gone. Version history tells you the file changed, not who moved four units or why |
| Stock balance per location | Yes Per-location balances with transfers between them; 2 locations on Starter, unlimited on Pro | Only by hand Possible with a column per location, until the columns disagree with the shelves and nobody can tell which is right |
| Two people working at once | Yes Per-product locking on stock movements, so simultaneous edits cannot both succeed against the same balance | Only by hand Co-authoring exists, but two people editing the same quantity resolve to one value with no record that the other one happened |
| Control over who can change what | Five roles admin, manager, sales, warehouse and viewer, enforced server-side rather than by convention | No Sharing is per file. Anyone who can open it to look something up can also overwrite it, deliberately or by accident |
| Finding a product by its specification | Yes Attributes defined per category and filterable — volts, amperage, fitment, whatever that category needs | Only by hand Text search across cells works until the detail lives in a description written three different ways by three different people |
LineraFlow prices and plan limits on this page are our own published figures, from our pricing page. A spreadsheet has no vendor and no published pricing, so there is nothing to cite in the other column — the comparison there is about capability, not cost.
Is a spreadsheet actually wrong for inventory?
No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. A sheet is the right tool for one location, one person updating it, and a catalog you can hold in your head. What it cannot do is hold a number that two people are changing at once, or tell you who changed it last week, and those are the problems that arrive with a second location or a second person.
What breaks first when a business outgrows one?
Almost always the difference between stock you have and stock you have promised. A cell holds one number, so committed and available have to be two columns somebody remembers to maintain. The counter double-sale — two people selling the same physical item — is the classic result, and it surfaces late, at the moment a customer arrives to collect.
Can I keep my spreadsheets during a move?
Yes, and you should. CSV import with dry-run validation is built in: you map your columns, run a pass that reports every row that would fail before anything is written, fix the source file, then run it for real. Most distributors migrate their own catalog and opening stock without help, and keep the old sheets readable for lookups.
What does $59 a month buy that a free file does not?
Reservations that hold stock against an order, an append-only history of every movement, per-location balances, and five roles so a person who needs to look something up cannot overwrite it. Whether that is worth $59 depends entirely on what one avoidable oversell costs you, which is a number only you can put a figure on.