I Finally Stopped Using a Google Sheet to Track Office Supplies (Here's What I Switched To)

Okay so this is going to sound embarrassing but bear with me.  I am an office manager at a mid-size marketing agency. We have about 60 people across two floors. 

For three years , I managed all our pantry and office supplies through a Google Sheet that I made myself in 2021. It had color coding. It had dropdown menus. I was genuinely proud of it.  Then we opened a second location.  That's when everything fell apart.  

I had people from both offices emailing me asking if we had printer paper. I had no idea what was at which location. Someone ordered 8 boxes of pens because they thought we were out. we had 4 boxes sitting in a cabinet nobody checked. 

Our monthly supply spend had quietly crept up by like 30% and I had no way to prove it or explain it.  My boss asked me to "get a handle on it." 

Honestly I just Googled "office supplies tracking software small business" and went down a rabbit hole for two evenings. Most of what came up was either enterprise procurement software that costs $800/month and requires an IT department to set up, or just... another spreadsheet template.

I then came across OfficeStoreApp and signed up mostly because it had a free trial and didn't ask for my credit card immediately (which, as a person who has been burned before, I appreciate).

Setup was genuinely not painful

I was expecting the usual "schedule a demo with our team" runaround. Instead I just created an account, set up my organization, added both office locations as separate sites, and started adding items to the catalogue.

The catalogue part was my favorite bit honestly. You add your items once, like paper towels, coffee pods, sticky notes, etc and then they're available across all your locations. I was done with initial setup in maybe 90 minutes including entering all our regular stock items. I did it over two lunch breaks.


What actually changed day to day

The thing that made the biggest difference wasn't anything fancy. It was the reorder point alerts.

You set a minimum quantity for each item at each location, and when stock drops below that, it flags it. That's it. That's the feature. It sounds so basic but I cannot tell you how many times I had to physically walk around checking cabinets before. Now I get a heads up before we run out instead of finding out because someone puts a passive aggressive note on the empty coffee station.

The request workflow also changed how I deal with people asking for supplies. Instead of someone Slacking me "hey do we have any more HDMI cables" and me having to go check. they submit a request through the app, I can see what we have across both sites, approve it, and track when it gets fulfilled. It sounds like more steps but it's actually less chaos because everything is in one place.

We also started generating actual purchase orders when we order from vendors. This sounds like a small thing but it meant I could finally show my boss a proper breakdown of what we're spending, with what suppliers, on what categories. That conversation went very differently than the previous quarter.


Is it perfect? No, here's what I'd fix

The mobile experience is functional but I wouldn't call it delightful. I mostly use it on desktop which is fine for my use case, but if you're someone who needs to be on the floor checking stock on your phone constantly, just know it works but it's not as polished as the desktop.

they are telling mobile app is in roadmap and I desperately wait for it.

Also the initial item catalogue import , if you have a lot of items then it takes a bit of time because you're doing it manually. I wish there was a CSV upload option. I've seen it mentioned in their roadmap stuff so maybe it's coming.


Would I recommend it

For teams our size (30-100 people, 1-3 locations), yes. It sits in a sweet spot where it's actually useful without requiring you to have a dedicated procurement person or an IT team to manage it.

If you've been living in spreadsheets and the chaos is getting to you, the learning curve is low enough that you'll have something working within a day. That's genuinely rare.

The link is https://officestoreapp.com/ if you want to look at it. Not affiliated, just a person who no longer has to guess whether we have printer paper.

#productivity, #officemanagement, #smallbusinesstools