# Small Business Inventory Management: A Free Inventory System for Shops, Studios and Makers

> Small business inventory management does not need warehouse software. Hoardo is a free inventory system for shops, studios, salons, bars and makers: rooms as locations, numbered boxes or shelves, QR labels you scan with a phone, CSV export and shared members. 100% free.

Published 2026-10-16, updated 2026-10-19 by Hoardo. Original: https://www.hoardo.com/articles/small-business-inventory-management

Small business inventory management is a list of what you stock, where it sits and how many you have left, that anyone on the floor can open on a phone. You do not need warehouse software for that. Hoardo is a free inventory system for small business: rooms as locations, numbered boxes or shelves, QR labels you scan with the phone camera, CSV export and shared members.

This is the working guide: how a shop, studio, salon, bar or maker actually sets the system up, what Hoardo does, and what it does not.

If you want the broader definition first, start with [what an inventory app is](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/what-is-an-inventory-app).

## What small business inventory management is

For a small shop the job is not purchase orders or a receiving dock. It is answering four questions before the next order goes in:

1. **What do we have?** Each product, bottle, shade, tool or roll of material as an item, with a count.
2. **Where is it?** The room (shop floor, stockroom, cellar, van) and the shelf or box inside that room.
3. **Can anyone find it?** Search across every room at once, or scan the label on the shelf in front of you.
4. **Can we take the list with us?** A CSV you export whenever you want a copy in a spreadsheet.

That is an inventory system for small business. Paid stock platforms add channels, suppliers and tills on top. Those extras are why they charge. A salon, a bar, a studio or a one-person shop often only needs the four questions.

## An inventory system for small business, without the warehouse

Warehouse apps organise by SKU, bin and order. A small shop organises by place. Hair colour lives in a drawer. Spare mezcal lives on a cellar rack. The laser level lives in the van. If the app does not know those places, the count on paper is still the real system.

Hoardo is built around place:

| In the shop | In Hoardo |
| --- | --- |
| A location (stockroom, back bar, studio, van) | A **room** |
| A shelf, drawer, fridge, crate or case | A **box** (pick the type: shelf, tote, freezer, van, plastic or cardboard) |
| A product, bottle, tool or roll | An **item**, with a quantity |
| The number written on the shelf | The box number (the name is optional) |
| A note such as "Left of the till" | The box description |

You can rename the room's words so "Box" reads as "Shelf" if that is how you talk. The structure stays the same.

*A salon as a room in Hoardo: each shelf, drawer and delivery is a numbered box, with how full it is.*

## Rooms as locations, boxes as shelves

Start with the places stock actually lives, not with a product catalogue.

1. **Make a room per location.** "Shop floor", "Stockroom", "Cellar", "Van". A second site is another room.
2. **Add a numbered box for each shelf, drawer, fridge or case.** Give it a type that matches (shelf for a retail wall, freezer for a walk-in, van for the work van). Write the number on the real shelf.
3. **Put a short place note in the description** if it helps: "Back wall, second from the left".
4. **Set fullness** so a nearly empty shelf stands out on the room screen.
5. **Add the items.** Type a name and a count, say a delivery out loud, or photograph the open shelf and check the list Hoardo writes. See [AI inventory management](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/ai-inventory-management) for how photo scan, voice and chat write that list.

You do not have to log every paperclip. "Developer 20 vol (6)" is a good item. So is "6 mm cable ties (200)". Counts that you reorder on are the ones worth keeping.

*One back bar shelf as a box: each bottle with how many are on that shelf.*

## How a shop, studio, salon, bar or maker sets it up

The same three levels fit very different floors.

**A salon.** Backbar, colour drawer, retail wall, deliveries and linen each become a box. The same shampoo can sit in two boxes, each with its own count, so staff do not pull retail stock into the basins. The full walkthrough is the [salon inventory app](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/salon-inventory-app) guide.

**A bar.** One box per back-bar shelf, plus the speed rail, each fridge and each cellar rack. A weekly count is opening the shelf and changing the numbers that moved. See the [bar inventory app](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/bar-inventory-app) guide.

**A kitchen.** Walk-in, dry store, line fridges and bulk bins. Search for "chickpeas" and you see the cans in the dry store and the cooked batch on the line. See the [restaurant inventory app](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/restaurant-inventory-app) guide.

**A studio or workshop.** Shelves of material, a drawer of hardware, a crate of samples. Makers who sell spare pieces can put them on a selling list and open a public page of what is for sale, without showing where it is stored.

**Trades and vans.** The van, each case and each job site are boxes. Search shows which one holds the laser level. That setup is in the [tool tracking app](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/tool-tracking-app) guide.

*A work van as a box: every tool in it, how many, and what kind.*

## QR labels and barcode scanning

A barcode inventory system in a small shop does not have to be a gun and a pallet of SKUs. In Hoardo it is a QR label you print for each box or shelf. The QR code is a two-dimensional barcode. Scanning it with the phone camera opens that box, with the list and the photo, so you do not have to unpack it (or send someone to the cellar with a torch).

Open **Prints** in the room menu. You get a sheet of labels: each one has the QR code, the box number and the name. Print on plain paper, or on standard A4 sticker sheets from Avery, HERMA and others (the picker has 40+ layouts). Stick one on the shelf.

*The Prints screen in Hoardo: pick a sticker sheet, then print a QR label for every box in the room.*

Hoardo does not scan the 1D barcodes printed on shop products, and it does not talk to a warehouse stock system. The code on the label only means "this shelf" or "this box". What is on it is what you typed, said or photographed. The full setup is in the [barcode inventory system](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/barcode-inventory-system) guide.

## Add stock by typing, speaking or taking a photo

Three ways in, because a delivery should not mean an hour of typing:

- **Type** a name and a quantity. Fastest for one new line.
- **Speak.** "Six tubes of 7.1 and four litres of 6 percent developer" becomes items you check and save.
- **Photograph** the open shelf or crate. Hoardo lists what it sees, with counts of identical things. Each item keeps one photo.

You can also ask Hoardo in the chat ("where is the spare mezcal?").

## Find it, count it, get an email when it runs low

Search covers every box in every room you can see. Type "7.1" or "mezcal" or "cable ties" and you get the item, the count, the box and the room.

On each item you can set **Notify me?** against the quantity. When the count is down to the level you chose (and again after it has gone back up), Hoardo emails you. That is a low-stock alert on the count you keep, not a link to a supplier or a till. You still place the order.

A count itself is changing the numbers that moved. Everything else stays as it was, so a weekly pass is a few taps per shelf.

## Share the list with the people who count

Invite people to the room. Each member can view or edit. A second colourist, a barback or a studio assistant costs nothing extra. They see the rooms you shared. Lists (packing, lending, selling) are shared on their own, so a selling page never has to show the stockroom.

View access is enough for someone who only needs to look up a shade. Edit is for the people who change counts.

## Export a CSV when you need a copy

From a room, export the inventory as CSV: box number, box name, item, quantity, price, category, date, notes, lists and photo. It opens in Numbers, Excel or Google Sheets. Export a list the same way when you want that slice. Your data stays yours.

## What this inventory system is not

Hoardo does not connect to a till or a booking system. It does not raise purchase orders, talk to suppliers, cost recipes or work out pour costs. It does not scan product barcodes from a packet. It is a shared record of what is on each shelf, with labels, search, an email when a count you watch runs low, and a file you can take with you.

For a small shop, studio, salon, bar or maker, that is usually the part that was missing. If you later need channels and purchase orders, that is a different class of tool, and you will know because the CSV is no longer enough.

## Free for the whole shop

[Hoardo](https://www.hoardo.com/) is 100% free: rooms, boxes, items and shared members, one photo per item, QR labels, CSV export, no billing page and no paid tier. A second stockroom or a fifth job site never costs more.

Image recognition, voice recognition and the assistant are included; they are not an upsell.

For how that sits next to Sortly, Zoho Inventory and other names people search for, see the [roundup of free inventory apps](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/5-best-free-inventory-management-apps). For home storage rather than a shop, [free inventory management at home](https://www.hoardo.com/articles/free-inventory-management) is the matching guide.

[Get started free](https://www.hoardo.com/)