Do I need inventory management software, or can I still run this on spreadsheets?
The short answer
Spreadsheets are fine until you're placing more than one or two POs a month or selling across more than one channel, past that, manual tracking silently drifts from reality and you find out via a stockout or a warehouse audit gone wrong. Increff and Unicommerce dominate the India mid-market for a reason: they sync inventory across your own site, marketplaces and quick-commerce dark stores in real time, which spreadsheets structurally cannot do. Below roughly ₹1 crore in revenue a disciplined spreadsheet is genuinely okay; past that, the software pays for itself in prevented stockouts alone.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
Why we picked it
A side-by-side of the actual India-relevant software shortlist a founder would be choosing between, rather than a generic global vendor list that ignores Indian marketplace and quick-commerce integrations.
Why we picked it
Frames inventory as a working-capital and cash problem first, tooling second, the right mental model for a founder who's about to tie up money in stock. Includes tool picks by revenue band, which is more useful than a generic 'best practices' list.
Why we picked it
A soup-to-nuts 2026 refresh covering AI-driven automation, unified inventory and faster last-mile expectations, good as a single reference to decide what 'modern' inventory management should look like for an Indian brand right now.
Why we picked it
The category-defining tool for founder-led DTC brands who are still running inventory off spreadsheets, it predicts stockouts, recommends PO quantities against supplier lead times, and quantifies revenue lost to being out of stock, which is the number that actually gets budget approved.
