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Managing Your Inventory: From Days of Data Entry to Minutes of Automation

Drop in the vendor's price sheet and 1sixty8 Manifold turns days of hand-keyed inventory into minutes of review.

By Mitch Schaffer

A shop owner at the desk after closing, typing at a monitor showing the 1sixty8 Manifold Review Before Importing screen, a thick printed price sheet beside the keyboard. The headline reads: Hundreds of items in ten minutes. Three lines beneath it read: CSV, Excel or PDF. Barcodes come along too. Next sheet flags changes. A handwritten note pointing at the screen reads: Ordering thresholds and pricing get set here, before anything goes live.

One of the things I hated most about running Mobile Edge was keying in new inventory. A rep would sit down across the desk, lay a new price sheet in front of me, and I already knew how the following week was going to go: a few hours I didn’t have, spent typing item after item, plus a handful of mistakes that wouldn’t surface until weeks or months later, when somebody sold a part at the wrong number or couldn’t find something that should have been in the system.

COVID was the worst of it. Pricing was changing almost weekly, and managing my inventory and keeping things up to date became a full-time job sitting on top of my actual job.

When I started building 1sixty8 Manifold, getting rid of that task was something I was stubborn about. The mission is extreme efficiency for the shops using 1sixty8 Manifold, and there is nothing efficient about an owner hand keying hundreds of line items after close.

I looked at a lot of ways to do it. For a while I considered going straight to the manufacturers and having them feed pricing into the platform. The more I looked at that, the less I liked it:

  • Different retailers pay different prices.
  • Availability isn’t the same for everybody either.
  • It puts control of when your cost and pricing data hits your floor in the vendor’s hands rather than yours.

That last one decided it.

So we built what we are currently calling Price Sheet Ingestion. You drop a price sheet into 1sixty8 Manifold as a CSV, an Excel file, or a PDF. It parses the data, structures it, and gives you a quick dashboard where you set threshold levels for ordering and massage the pricing if you need to. A sheet with hundreds of items on it, the kind that used to eat several days, is done in 10 minutes, with all of that new product entered and ready to go. If the vendor put UPC barcode data on the sheet, that comes along with it as well. And everything is populated in a clean, consistent format.

Prices change, so the back half of this matters as much as the front. When the next sheet comes out, you run the same process, and 1sixty8 Manifold flags anything that has changed or is different from what is already in the platform. You look at what moved instead of going hunting for it.

I don’t miss those weeks. If the one I described sounds like yours, send me a note and I will show you what the Price Sheet Ingestion process looks like.