When Excel is enough
Let’s be clear: for some businesses a spreadsheet is fine, and switching doesn’t make sense yet.
- One person enters the stock and it’s the same person who sells.
- A single warehouse and few products, which you can review at a glance.
- A single sales channel: the counter. You don’t list on marketplaces or in an online store.
- Credit sales are few and you keep track of them in your head or in a notebook.
If that’s you, a tidy spreadsheet, with unique codes and a count every so often, works. You already have it and everyone knows how to use it.
When it starts to cost you
The cost of a spreadsheet doesn’t show up on any invoice. It shows up like this:
- Two people edit the same spreadsheet and one overwrites the other’s work.
stock_FINAL_v3 (2).xlsxappears. - Stock lives in several places: the office spreadsheet, the warehouse notebook, the number you listed on Mercado Libre. One of them is always lying.
- You sell something you don’t have. It sold at the counter and on a marketplace at the same time, and the spreadsheet found out about neither.
- Nobody knows what’s committed. There are 400 bags in the yard, but 300 are promised to a job.
- The numbers can’t be explained. 20 bags are missing and there’s no way to know when, who or why.
Side-by-side comparison
| Excel or spreadsheet | Aty | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | You already have it. | Monthly subscription, with 14 days free (see plans). |
| Learning to use it | Everyone knows it. | You have to learn it; it’s built for the industry. |
| Several people at once | Changes overwrite each other. | Each person with their own user and role. |
| Change history | If someone writes it down. | Every movement with its reason, who and when. |
| Committed stock | By hand, if someone remembers. | Available = physical − what’s set aside by orders. |
| Several warehouses | One sheet or one column per warehouse. | Balance per warehouse and recorded transfers. |
| Marketplaces and store | Each one updated by hand. | One change reaches every connected channel. |
| Replenishment | A formula someone builds. | Suggested from actual consumption and supplier lead time (Pro). |
| Customer accounts | Yet another sheet. | Debt aging and checks in your portfolio. |
| Use from a phone | Awkward. | Built to be used in the warehouse, from your phone. |
| Free-form analysis | Unbeatable: pivot tables, charts, whatever you want. | Fixed reports and CSV download to keep working in Excel. |
What doesn’t change
Moving to Aty doesn’t mean leaving Excel. Aty’s reports, such as sales by month, ABC curve and margin by category, download as CSV and open in Excel with a double click, with columns properly separated and accents intact. Your data stays yours: export it or read it through the API whenever you want.
What changes is where the real number lives. In a spreadsheet, every copy is a version. In Aty there’s only one, and the spreadsheet becomes what it should always have been: a tool for analysis, not the record.
Conclusion
If you sell only at the counter, with one person and one warehouse, stay with Excel and keep it tidy. If you sell through more than one channel, with more than one person or from more than one warehouse, the spreadsheet is costing you lost sales and hours of reconciliation, even if you can’t see it anywhere. That’s where a system like Aty pays for itself.
If you decide to switch, the guide to migrating from Excel has the columns and the step-by-step.