Spreadsheets: cheap to start, expensive to keep
For a single location with a modest number of products and one person in charge, a well-built spreadsheet is hard to beat. There’s no subscription and no training.
- One file per site, updated by hand
- Whoever owns the file becomes your admin
- No record of who changed what, or why
- Every new process means another tab or formula
The cost isn’t the software. It’s the hours spent keeping it accurate, and the mistakes that slip through when nobody has time to.
Traditional ERP: powerful, but heavy
An ERP connects inventory with finance, purchasing, production and more. For a large organisation with an IT team, that breadth is the point. For a 10-person business it often means:
- A long implementation, usually through a paid partner
- Modules and settings your team will never use
- An in-house admin to keep it configured
- Export, edit and re-import whenever you want to work in Excel
Inventory software: the middle path
Dedicated inventory and order management sits between the two. It tracks stock across locations, orders, receiving and vendors, without the weight of a full ERP. The question to ask is who changes it when your process changes. With most tools, the answer is still you, or a paid partner.
A side-by-side view
Questions to ask any option
- Can it track stock across all your locations, including transfers?
- Who builds new processes when your business changes?
- Do you need an in-house admin to run it?
- Can your team keep working in Excel without copying data around?
How Valyxto answers them
- Yes, with tracked transfers between warehouses
- The Valyxto team, with a fixed quote per feature
- No. You set up your data; we handle the rest
- Yes, with two-way sync through Converge
What it costs
Valyxto is $15,000 USD a year, billed annually, for unlimited users, locations and warehouses. Implementation is a one-time fee from $15,000 USD, quoted upfront, and new features get a fixed quote before we start.
Valyxto isn’t accounting software. It runs operations: stock, orders, vendors and customers. Bookkeeping, financial statements, payroll and tax stay in your accounting software, such as QuickBooks or Xero.
So which one fits?
- Spreadsheets if you have one location, low volume and someone who enjoys keeping the file tidy.
- Inventory software if you have more than one location and want a real system without hiring someone to run it.
- ERP if you need finance, production and inventory in one platform, and have the team to implement and maintain it.
The right system is the one your team will actually keep up to date.
Book a 20-minute demo and we’ll look at how you track stock today.
