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For most small businesses, inventory is the second-largest use of cash after payroll and rent. Yet it rarely gets managed with the same discipline. Payroll runs on a schedule. Rent is a fixed line item. Inventory, by contrast, is often tracked in a spreadsheet that someone updates when they remember to, or not tracked in any structured way at all until a bestseller runs out mid-season or a storage unit fills up with stock that stopped moving a year ago.

That gap matters more for a small business than a large one. A national retailer that misjudges demand on one product line barely notices. A small business that ties up a third of its working capital in the wrong stock can spend months recovering.

This guide covers what inventory management actually involves, the core methods worth knowing, how to build a working system from scratch, and where a spreadsheet stops being enough.

What Inventory Management Means for a Small Business

Inventory management is the process of tracking, ordering, and controlling the stock a business buys and sells, so it has the right amount of product on hand without tying up more cash than necessary.

At a large company, that process is usually a dedicated function with its own software and staff. At a small business, it’s typically one person, often the owner, doing it alongside sales, hiring, and everything else.

That difference shapes the whole approach. A small business can’t absorb the cost of overstock the way a larger one can, and it usually can’t negotiate the supplier terms that make just-in-time ordering low-risk. The goal isn’t to copy enterprise inventory practices at a smaller scale. It’s to run a version built for thin margins, limited storage, and one or two people managing it.

Why Small Businesses Struggle With It

The challenges are fairly consistent across industries, even though the products differ.

Knowing how much to buy. Order too much and cash sits on a shelf instead of in the business. Order too little and a customer walks out empty-handed or worse, buys from a competitor and doesn’t come back.

Limited space. Most small businesses don’t have a warehouse to absorb excess stock. A storage closet or a corner of the shop floor has to do double duty, which makes overbuying a physical problem as much as a financial one.

Manual tracking errors. Spreadsheets and handwritten logs drift from reality fast. A miscount here, a forgotten update there, and the numbers on paper stop matching what’s actually on the shelf.

Supplier leverage. Small businesses generally don’t have the order volume to negotiate the pricing or flexible terms that larger buyers get, which makes lead times and minimum order quantities harder constraints to work around.

Seasonal and demand swings. A slow month can look like healthy inventory levels right up until a rush hits and reveals how thin the buffer actually was.

None of these are solved by one trick. They’re solved by picking a method that fits the business and applying it consistently, which is the next section.

Core Inventory Management Methods

A handful of methods cover most of what a small business needs. Few businesses use just one; most combine two or three.

ABC Analysis

ABC analysis sorts inventory into three tiers based on value and sales impact, not just volume:

• A items : a small share of SKUs that drive the largest share of revenue or cost. These get the closest attention: frequent counts, tighter reorder rules, stronger supplier relationships.
• B items : moderate value, moderate attention. Monthly reviews are usually enough.
• C items : the bulk of the catalog by count, but a small share of value. Quarterly review is often sufficient, and some businesses move slow C items to special-order only.

The practical benefit is focus. A business with 500 SKUs doesn’t need to watch all 500 with equal intensity, it needs to watch the 50 or so that actually move the needle.

A quick example: a boutique candle shop carries 120 SKUs. Ranking them by annual revenue shows that 18 scented candles account for roughly 70% of sales – those become A items, checked weekly. The next 30 or so items (seasonal scents, gift sets) make up another 20% of revenue and become B items, reviewed monthly. The remaining 70-plus SKUs – one-off colors, discontinued scents still on the shelf – generate the last 10% and become C items, counted quarterly and candidates for clearance if they don’t move.

FIFO (First In, First Out)

FIFO means the oldest stock sells first. It’s standard for anything perishable or trend-sensitive – food, cosmetics, seasonal apparel – where holding onto older inventory too long turns it into a write-off. Rotating stock physically (older items to the front) makes FIFO easy to enforce without extra software.

Reorder Point (ROP)

The reorder point is the stock level that triggers a new order, calculated as expected demand during the supplier’s lead time, plus a buffer for uncertainty (safety stock):

Reorder point = (average daily sales × lead time in days) + safety stock

Example: a product sells 8 units a day, and the supplier takes 6 days to deliver. Lead-time demand is 48 units. Add a safety stock buffer of 15 units for demand variability, and the reorder point is 63 units – the moment stock hits that number, it’s time to order, not the moment the shelf looks low.

Economic Order Quantity (EOQ)

EOQ estimates the order size that minimizes total cost by balancing ordering costs (placing and receiving an order) against carrying costs (storing it). It’s most useful for A-tier items with steady, predictable demand for volatile or seasonal products, it tends to oversimplify.

Just-in-Time (JIT)

JIT means ordering stock to arrive right when it’s needed, minimizing how much cash sits in storage. It works well when suppliers are fast and reliable. For a small business with a single supplier and a multi-week lead time, it’s a riskier fit – a single delayed shipment can mean empty shelves with no buffer to absorb it.

Building an Inventory System, Step by Step

Most small businesses don’t need a sophisticated system on day one. They need a consistent one.

1. Pick one tracking method and commit to it. Spreadsheet, dedicated software, or a hybrid, the specific tool matters less than using it consistently. Switching methods every few months is what causes the drift that leads to phantom inventory: stock that exists on paper but not on the shelf, or vice versa.

2. Set par levels and reorder points for your top sellers first. Trying to calculate reorder points for an entire catalog on day one is a good way to never finish. Start with the 15–20 SKUs that drive most of the revenue, using the ABC framework above, and expand from there.

3. Build in cycle counting. Instead of one exhausting annual count, count a rotating slice of inventory on a regular schedule – A items weekly or biweekly, B items monthly, C items quarterly. Discrepancies get caught while they’re small, not after they’ve compounded for a year.

4. Connect inventory to your books. If sales, stock counts, and accounting live in three disconnected places, someone is doing manual reconciliation and manual reconciliation is where errors hide the longest. Setting up a solid framework for small business bookkeeping ensures your inventory costs accurately flow into your financial statements.

Spreadsheet or Software? Knowing When to Switch

A spreadsheet is a perfectly reasonable inventory system for a business with a small catalog and one sales channel. The signs it’s time to move on are fairly clear:

• Stock counts are wrong often enough that staff double-check before promising a customer availability
• The business sells across more than one channel (in-store, online, marketplace) and keeping them in sync manually eats real time each week
• Inventory tracking is taking hours a week that could go toward the business itself
• The business has outgrown a single location

When those signs show up, a handful of tools cover most small business needs:

*Confirm current pricing directly with each vendor, plans and rates change frequently.

None of these is universally “best” – the right one depends on sales channels, whether the business manufactures anything, and what it already uses for point-of-sale or accounting. It’s worth testing free tiers or trials against actual order volume before committing to a paid plan. If the business is also choosing accounting software around the same time, best small business accounting software is worth reading alongside this, since the two decisions often affect each other.

Inventory KPIs Worth Tracking

A few numbers reveal whether an inventory system is actually working, beyond a gut sense of “we seem to be running low on things.”

Inventory Turnover Ratio

How many times inventory is sold and replaced over a period, calculated as COGS [cost of goods sold – the direct cost of the products a business sells, defined in detail in the IRS’s Tax Guide for Small Business] ÷ average inventory value. A low ratio suggests overstocking or slow-moving products; a very high one can mean the business is understocked and risking stockouts.

Carrying Cost

The cost of holding inventory, including storage, insurance, and capital tied up. It typically runs 20–30% of inventory value per year. When working with tight cash margins, cutting unnecessary overhead – whether by avoiding overstocking or using free payroll software for your team, helps keep operating capital free for inventory replenishment.

Stockout Rate

The share of demand that couldn’t be met because an item was out of stock. This one is easy to underestimate, since a stockout often shows up as a customer who simply leaves rather than a complaint that gets logged.

Sell-Through Rate

The percentage of received stock that actually sells within a given period. A consistently low sell-through rate on a product is usually the clearest early signal that it needs to be discounted, bundled, or dropped.

Mistakes That Quietly Cost Small Businesses Money

Buying in bulk without running the carrying-cost math. A supplier discount for ordering 500 units instead of 100 looks like savings on the invoice. If 300 of those units sit unsold for six months, the storage and capital cost can erase the discount entirely.

Counting inventory once a year and trusting the number the rest of the time. A lot can drift in eleven months. Cycle counting catches problems while they’re still small and cheap to fix.

Treating every sales channel as the same pool of stock. A business selling in-store and online without synced inventory will eventually oversell a product on one channel while it sits unsold in the other.

Ignoring supplier lead time until it becomes urgent. Reorder points built on the assumption that a supplier will always deliver on time tend to fail exactly when they’re needed most – during a supplier’s own busy season.

Not distinguishing A items from C items. Applying the same level of attention to a top seller and a slow-moving accessory wastes time on the products that matter least and under-manages the ones that matter most.

Where to Start

A small business doesn’t need every method in this guide running at once. The practical starting point is narrower: pick a tracking system, calculate reorder points for the products that actually drive revenue, and build in a counting rhythm that catches errors before they compound. Everything else – software, KPIs, more advanced methods like EOQ – is worth adding once that foundation is in place, not before.

Disney and TikTok have agreed a deal which will allow creators to use clips from Disney films, including its subsidiaries, in their videos.

It means clips from hit franchises like Star Wars, Toy Story and the Marvel Cinematic Universe will soon start popping up in videos – which will also be shared on Disney’s short-form video platform, Verts.

The scheme will be launched in the US before being rolled out to other countries.

Neither company shared financial details of the agreement, although it follows the collapse of a $1bn (£745m) deal between Disney and OpenAI which would have let people use its characters in AI-generated videos.

That agreement was cancelled in March when OpenAI shut down its AI video generation tool Sora, citing a decision to focus on other parts of its business.

“Today, fans are celebrating our stories in entirely new ways,” said Disney’s chief marketing and brand officer Asad Ayaz, following the TikTok deal being announced.

“Disney owns some of the world’s biggest franchises but ownership of attention is shifting towards creators,” social media expert Matt Navarra told BBC News.

“Hollywood used to market at fans – now it needs to give fans the raw materials to market with it, and that is quite a profound shift.”

TikTok said its platform saw an average of 6.5 million posts relating to film and TV per day last year.

Fans like to use clips from films and TV shows in their videos, but without express permission, they would often be taken down due to copyright claims.

This makes it harder for a wide audience to engage with fan-created content around a big release.

TikTok would also benefit from the “credibility of becoming a formal distribution partner to one of Hollywood’s biggest studios,” Navarra said.

He added that TikTok’s recommendation algorithm gives it the power to “influence which character or scene or forgotten franchise suddenly becomes very valuable again”.

Disney and TikTok said a jointly-run programme would boost some creators’ videos and give them access to exclusive events.

“This is a deal that repositions and recovers Disney in the UGC [user-generated content] space following the content gap left by the sudden collapse of Sora,” Gareth Sutcliffe from Enders Analysis said.

But he said it was not without risk.

“There is an ongoing safety debate around TikTok under European online rules,” he said.

“At a minimum, Disney will need to employ significant guardrails to curate the creator content that is selected.”

Online creators and influencers are becoming more important to brands’ marketing strategies.

Last year, a report from Oxford Economics said YouTube content creators contributed £2.2bn to the UK economy in 2024 and supported 45,000 jobs.

There is also a recognition that even very small influencers, who focus on niche topics, might have lower follower counts but come with a hyper-engaged audience.

Disney launched its short form video platform Verts in the US in March, with plans to expand that further around the world.

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Chelsea and Juventus meet Wednesday in one of the summer’s most closely watched preseason friendlies, with both European giants using the match at Kai Tak Sports Park in Hong Kong to fine-tune their squads ahead of the 2026-27 season.

The match, part of the Hong Kong Football Festival 2026, kicks off at 7:30 p.m. local time in Hong Kong, which translates to 8 a.m. UTC. That puts the start time at roughly 4 a.m. Eastern time in the United States, giving American fans an early wake-up call if they want to catch the match live.

How to Watch in the United States

Fans in the United States have multiple ways to follow the match. The game will be shown live on Prime Video, Paramount+ and CBS Sports Golazo, giving viewers a choice between several major streaming platforms depending on existing subscriptions. Paramount+ carries CBS Sports’ soccer coverage broadly, including UEFA Champions League matches, in addition to a wide slate of other sports and entertainment programming, while CBS Sports Golazo offers dedicated soccer coverage as part of its programming lineup.

How to Watch in the UK and Elsewhere

For fans in the United Kingdom, the match will not be shown on traditional television. Instead, Chelsea is streaming the game live through the club’s own CFC+ subscription service, available via the Chelsea Official App and the club’s website. Supporters should note that the CFC+ stream will not be available in Hong Kong, Macau or Italy, meaning fans in those specific markets will need to seek alternative broadcast options where available.

For those without access to a CFC+ subscription or one of the U.S. streaming platforms, Chelsea’s Matchday Live service offers minute-by-minute updates throughout the match via the club’s official app and website, including confirmed starting lineups as soon as they are announced, along with live text commentary, statistics and imagery throughout the game. Juventus has also indicated the match will be available to watch for free through its own club channels as part of coverage of what the Italian club is calling the first fixture of its Summer Tour.

WATCH HERE

A Big Test for Both Sides

Wednesday’s match represents a significant challenge for both clubs as they continue building toward the new season. Chelsea enter the fixture off the back of a disappointing 2-1 defeat to rivals Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday in Sydney, a result that saw manager Xabi Alonso continuing to experiment with his tactical setup as his first full season in charge of the Premier League side approaches. Alonso’s side also faced 10-man Tottenham during the Australian leg of their preseason tour before moving on to face Juventus and, subsequently, AC Milan in Hong Kong and Jakarta.

Juventus, meanwhile, arrive in strong defensive form, having yet to concede a goal across their preseason warmup matches so far, most recently claiming a 2-0 win over Nice. Manager Igor Tudor is using the club’s preseason schedule to continue establishing his tactical identity with the Serie A side ahead of the new campaign, and is expected to field a strong lineup against Chelsea given the profile of the opponent.

Squad News and Returning Players

Among the storylines surrounding Chelsea’s squad ahead of the match is the potential involvement of winger Mykhailo Mudryk, who could make his return to competitive football after a 20-month suspension following an adverse finding for a banned substance in 2024. Alonso has confirmed that the 25-year-old, who joined Chelsea for $115 million in January 2023, is available for selection as the club continues preparing for the new season. Chelsea has been using its preseason friendlies broadly to build squad chemistry, improve match fitness, and integrate several new signings, while also providing valuable minutes to players returning from injury or international duty over the offseason.

What Comes Next

Wednesday’s match against Juventus is not Chelsea’s final preseason test. The club is scheduled to continue its Asia tour with a subsequent friendly against AC Milan in Hong Kong before wrapping up preparations with a match in Jakarta, Indonesia. Once the squad returns to London, Chelsea will host Real Sociedad at Stamford Bridge on Saturday, Aug. 15, in what is expected to be their final home tune-up before officially opening the 2026-27 Premier League season away to Fulham on Monday, Aug. 24.

For Juventus, Wednesday’s fixture against Chelsea is similarly positioned as one of the tougher tests of their preseason slate, with the Italian club continuing preparations for their own return to competitive football as the new Serie A campaign approaches.

A Marquee Preseason Matchup

While no trophy or competition points are on the line, Wednesday’s friendly carries added significance given the profile of both clubs and the timing within their respective preseason schedules. With Chelsea working to sharpen its form under Alonso following back-to-back tour matches, and Juventus looking to extend a clean defensive record under Tudor, the match offers both managers a valuable opportunity to assess squad depth and tactical cohesion against high-level opposition before facing the pressures of the regular season.

Fans looking to follow the match across any platform are advised to confirm regional streaming availability ahead of kickoff, given the blackout restrictions in place for Hong Kong, Macau and Italy on Chelsea’s own CFC+ service, as well as the early morning start time facing viewers across North America.

The development of a skyscraper in New York City that will house Ken Griffin’s Citadel is moving forward despite his feud with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The skyscraper project at 350 Park Avenue is being developed by Griffin’s Citadel in partnership with Vornado Realty Trust and Rudin, and will see two of Griffin’s firms being anchor tenants.

Steven Roth, CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, said on the company’s earnings call on Tuesday that the project is underway and that the REIT will maximize its stake in the venture.

“If you drive or walk past Park Avenue at 52nd Street, you will see that our 350 Park Avenue site is now under construction, actually under demolition. We intend to shortly exercise our investment option to participate in this deal at our maximum ownership alongside Ken Griffin as our 60% partner and with Citadel as our 1-million-square-foot anchor tenant.”

HEDGE FUND BILLIONAIRE EXPANDS MIAMI DEVELOPMENT PLANS AFTER MAMDANI FEUD

The new skyscraper being built by Citadel, Vornado and Rudin will be at 350 Park Ave. in New York City. (Fox Business)

Roth said on the call that Citadel holds a 60% stake in the partnership, while Vornado’s will top out at 36%.

The project is moving forward after Mamdani specifically criticized Griffin for owning a penthouse on Central Park South in a video detailing his new pied-a-terre tax, which is levied on high-value residential properties whose owners don’t live in the city full-time.

Mamdani spurred the controversy with an April 15 video the mayor recorded in front of Griffin’s penthouse, calling him out as a wealthy hedge fund owner who would be subject to the new luxury property tax.

NEW YORK’S WEALTHY RUSH TO AVOID MAMDANI’S SECOND-HOME TAX

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stands outside of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin’s Park Avenue penthouse in an April 15, 2026, video.  (NYC Mayor’s Office)

“When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today we’re taxing the rich… This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city – like this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” Mamdani said in his video.

Griffin responded, calling the personal attack “creepy and weird,” worrying that it put him in harm’s way and demonstrated a “profound lack of judgment,” on Mamdani’s part.

MAMDANI’S TAX ROLL BLUNDER WILL BACKFIRE ON EVERYDAY NEW YORKERS AS BUYERS HEAD SOUTH, DEVELOPER WARNS

Citadel CEO and founder Ken Griffin said Mamdani’s video was “creepy and weird.” (Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Citadel executives went on to suggest that the new office space could become a casualty of Mamdani’s not-so-business-friendly policies.

Gerald Beeson, the firm’s COO, wrote in an April 23 memo to employees that the firm’s development of 350 Park Avenue was about to begin and would create “6,000 highly paid construction jobs” as well as support the “creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in Midtown New York.”

“The project – if we move forward – will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending,” Beeson wrote.

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Mamdani eventually softened his rhetoric and thanked Griffin for his contributions to the city, including funding a memorial wall for police officers killed in the September 11 attacks and those who died of illnesses related to the recovery from the attacks that will open later this year in NYC Police Headquarters.

FOX Business’ Robert McGreevey contributed to this report.