Salon inventory spreadsheet template that survives a busy week

Most spa and salon owners who have tried to get stock under control started the same way. A Sunday afternoon, a laptop, a clean sheet, and behind them a week where something ran out halfway through a color.

By October the file is still on the desktop. Nobody has opened it since August, and it is almost never because the sheet was built badly. Some of the abandoned ones are beautiful.

Here is the whole build of a salon inventory spreadsheet: the structure, the tabs, the columns that earn their place. And waiting at the end, already built: the finished file, yours to copy, no email and no registration. If you would rather have one shaped exactly like your salon, there is a second thing down there too. Two of the design decisions in this build will look odd at first, and they are why this shape holds up in a working week.

One factor decides whether your sheet is still open at Christmas, and it comes near the end. The wider picture sits in our guide to salon inventory management.

🧾 The sheet asks the questions you have been avoiding

I'd argue a salon inventory spreadsheet is one of the most useful afternoons you can spend on the business, whether or not you ever move to software. Building one forces answers out of you: what you carry, what it costs, how much is standing on a shelf right now. Most owners have never totaled a year of product spend. The invoices arrive one at a time, the year never gets added up, and the number stings a little when it finally appears.

For scale, SBDCNet puts US hair care services at around $25 billion across roughly 84,000 establishments, close to $300,000 a shop. Product is one of the largest lines in a business that size, and reliably the least examined.

The build starts with a decision people get wrong before typing a single product name.

📍 Organize by place

Almost everyone builds the sheet around what a product is for: back bar here, retail there, a section for the storefront.

The more useful unit is the place: anywhere product comes in and goes out. A pro's station is one. So is a treatment room, a showroom shelf, or the cupboard that only opens on delivery day. Each is a small warehouse with its own incoming and outgoing, and the same shampoo standing in three of them is three numbers. Which is why counts made from memory never match.

💡 The test for a place: if you can stand in front of it and count everything there without walking anywhere else, it is a place. If you have to walk, that is two places.

The tabs still split back bar from retail, because what disappears at the back bar has nothing in common with what sells off a shelf. Inside each tab, though, the columns are places. That is the design in one sentence.

Do the walk around your salon now and count the places out loud. That short list is the only thing the file at the end will ask you for. Every column in it is already a place, waiting to be renamed to yours.

Which brings up the second decision: when anything gets written down at all.

🗑️ The bin is already your system

A pro doing a color uses five products and will never record five products. Any system asking for per-service logging wants something a working floor cannot give.

Watch what people already do when a bottle runs out: tear the top off the box, drop it in a bin by the door, reorder from the bin once a week.

That bin is the system. The sheet is the bin written down. Once a week, before the order goes in, you count and write it down in one sitting. Those two decisions have already built the structure below.

It's also the idea Suplery is built on. Nobody should have to log five products in the middle of a color service, so nothing gets logged there. You count on your day, from your phone, and Suplery works out how fast each product goes from one count to the next.

🗂️ Seven tabs, and the order list writes itself

• Start here: how the file works in five steps, and what it does not do
• Suppliers: who you buy from, minimum order, days to delivery, and the conditions you would otherwise forget. Filled in once
• Back bar: professional product, counted room by room, plus backstock
• Retail: the shelf plus backstock, checked against what the till says you should have
• Order list: everything below the level you set, grouped by supplier, with minimums checked. Nothing is typed here
• History: one row per product per count, the only place a trend can show up
• Count log: one line per count day, with total value, the change since last time, who counted and what happened

All seven come built in the file waiting at the end of this article, formulas included. Each week you type into the shaded cells only: the counts, who did them, and the week's totals into History. Everything else works itself out.

History and Count log turn a count into an answer. Without them you have a photograph, and you cannot plan against a photograph. The one-line note in Count log ("Vitamin C ordered twice, two people ordering") is the only thing that will explain a strange number three months from now.

Retail gets one check the back bar can never have. You type in what the till says you should have left, and the sheet shows the gap. A negative number is product that left without a sale behind it: a tester opened, a staff freebie, a sale rung up wrong, or theft. It is a question worth asking, and the sheet lets you ask it every week.

Suppliers does more work than it looks like. Placing an order costs something before the products in it: Ardent Partners puts the all-in cost of processing one invoice at $9.84 in its 2025 benchmark, measured across business generally. Lead times in one column let you order less often without running dry.

Once you're past a handful of suppliers, this is also the tab that eats the most evenings: checking minimums, matching lead times, splitting one list into five orders. It's the part Suplery takes over first, with a draft order per supplier built from how fast each product went between your counts, waiting for your yes.

Now the rows.

🔢 What a salon inventory spreadsheet needs in it

One row per product: name · size · supplier · cost each · a count column for each place · the total · the level you never want to go below. That is all you type. How many to buy, the status (OK, ORDER or OUT) and the value on hand work themselves out from it.

Never go below is your own call. You set it once per product, from what you already know about how fast it goes and how long delivery takes. The sheet compares every count against it, and that comparison is your order list.

Above the rows sit two things people skip: the count date and who counted each place. An undated number is a rumor. A number dated the 24th tells you exactly how much weight to give it on the 30th. And whoever counted a room owns that number, so if it turns out wrong, you know who to ask. They will remember why.

⚠️ Resist the extra column. Supplier code, category and margin are each defensible alone, and together they turn a half-hour count into an evening. The template also leaves three jobs out on purpose: reorder points worked out from usage rates, expiry and lot tracking, and inventory turnover. Each has its own piece (expiry and lot tracking for med-spas, inventory turnover and cost per service). Add a column only after a month of wishing it were there.

The template comes with these columns in this order, and the count date and names already at the top of every tab. Rename the places to yours and type in your products.

Filling it the first time is a different job from filling it every week after, so start there.

🗓️ The first pass is slow. Nothing after it is

The first pass is slow, and honestly a bit tedious, because you are building the list: deciding what you carry, what counts as a unit, what each place is called. That happens once, and the file at the end does the structure for you, so the only work left is the list itself. In the example spa inside the template, the first full count took most of the morning, the second took forty minutes, and by the fifth it was down to thirty.

My advice: start with what you reorder most often and what you cannot run a service without. Twenty products that move is a working sheet. Two hundred, including the toner someone bought in 2023, is a research project.

If your salon does not look much like the one this template was built for (a med-spa with lots, a lash studio with a hundred trays, three locations), the second free thing at the end is for you. It is the set of prompts that has ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini build the sheet around your business.

The count itself has a method, from where to start to what to do with half-empty bottles, and it is covered in how to do inventory in a salon.

The eleven months after the build are where sheets are won and lost.

🔁 Keeping the file alive

Four habits, and they matter more than the design:

Name the day. With up to three working pros, once a week is enough. The template counts on Monday morning, before the order goes in. A named day survives a busy month; a vague "weekly" rarely does.

Write down what happened. Every count gets one line in Count log: who counted, and anything odd. "Wax beads hit zero, room 3 rebooked a client" takes ten seconds to type, and in November it is the only thing that explains the dip.

Never improve the form while entering data. Input and redesign are separate jobs, and doing both in one sitting is how formulas get broken by someone who was trying to help.

Get formula help from the source. Search the exact phrase, such as "sum a column in Google Sheets", and take the answer from Google's own Sheets help. You only need to know how to look up the thing you are stuck on.

🧭 What the sheet is actually for

Counting is only the input. The sheet does three jobs with it.

It plans orders, so you decide what to buy before you run short. It controls usage and cost: room two goes through twice the serum room one does, and now you can see it. And it prevents the two expensive failures: running out mid-service, and the urgent order at full retail that follows.

All three collapse the same way: you stop being sure the sheet is right, and that happens long before it is actually wrong. One week skipped in August, one room nobody counted, and the file quietly stops being evidence.

So, the factor promised at the top. A spreadsheet asks for discipline: a systematic record, and maintenance of the file itself, every week, from everyone who touches it. That is the price of the method, and no template lowers it. It says nothing about you. What that discipline is worth in money is a question with a real answer, covered in how much money is buried in your inventory.

There are three places where it stops being able to help.

⚖️ Where the sheet stops

The second pair of hands. One person maintaining a file is a habit. Four people maintaining one file is a negotiation, and the version on your laptop is not always the one that was true this morning.

The back bar that empties invisibly. Retail leaves a receipt, which is why the gap check only exists on the Retail tab. Back bar leaves a slightly lighter bottle, and a weekly count catches the emptying but never the rate.

The day the order list gets long. ISPA's March 2024 Snapshot Survey found approximately one-third of responding spas partnering with 11 to 15 vendors in the retail area alone, each with its own minimum and its own lead time. A spreadsheet holds all of that. It holds it in your Tuesday evening.

Each of those is a property of a file that cannot see the shelf. Salon inventory management software is the trade you make when maintaining the file costs more than the answers are worth.

Take the file first, though. It answers most of this, it is two lines down, and it costs you nothing.

✨ Take the salon inventory template, free

Here they are, both of them, as promised.

The sheet. Open the salon inventory template and copy it to your own Drive. Seven tabs, place columns, working formulas, and one example month already filled in so you can see how it behaves. No email, no registration.

The prompts for building your own. If your business does not look like the example, these six prompts have ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini build the sheet around it. Run them in order, in one conversation, and paste the result into Google Sheets. No email, no registration.

🧩 Before the first prompt: list your places

Walk the salon and write down every place product sits: each station, each treatment room, the retail shelf, the stockroom. The test from earlier applies: if you can count everything there without walking, it is one place. You will paste this list into the first prompt.

Prompt 1. Describe the business.

Prompt 2. Agree the tabs.

Prompt 3. Rows and formulas.

Prompt 4. The order list.

Prompt 5. What is unusual about you.

Prompt 6. Test it before you trust it.

Two habits keep the result usable. Ask for Google Sheets formulas by name, because Excel syntax differs in places. And run the example rows first: an order list that works on ten test rows is one you can trust with your own.

🧡 When the file stops being the right tool

Suplery keeps the file for you: product added by photo, counts entered from any phone on the team, and after a couple of counts, a draft order per supplier waiting for your approval. Four people on the floor can count into the same stock. And your Tuesday evenings come back.

👉 Start on Suplery

What columns does a salon inventory spreadsheet need?

Per product: name, size, supplier, cost, a count for each place it is stored, the total, and the level you never want to drop under. Put the count date and who counted at the top of the tab. How many to buy, the status and the value on hand can all be formulas. The free template above comes built this way.

Excel or Google Sheets for salon stock?

Google Sheets, in almost every case. Two people can open it at once, it saves itself, and it opens on the phone in the stockroom where the counting happens. Excel is the better tool only if you already live in it.

How often should I update it?

Once a week for a team of up to three working pros, on a named day. The template counts on Monday morning, before the order goes in. Between counts the sheet is a guess, so it is only as good as the last count day.

Should back bar and retail be tracked separately?

Yes. Retail units leave through the till and can be checked against sales; back bar disappears into services and can only be counted against what is physically there. That is why only a retail tab can show a gap between what you counted and what the till says.

Do I count the same product separately in each room?

Yes, and that is the point. One shampoo in three places is three counts and one total. When the sheet and the shelf disagree, this is usually where it started.

How do I record usage without logging every treatment?

Keep a bin for empties by the door and enter it once a week. Recording at the point of use asks for something a working floor cannot give, which is why those systems get dropped.

Is a spreadsheet enough for two locations?

Rarely. Two locations mean two people maintaining one file, stock moving between sites, and orders that have to be split — the point at which the maintenance usually outgrows what the file gives back.