Moving your lab inventory off a spreadsheet: a practical checklist

Most labs start with a spreadsheet, and for a while it works. It stops working when the person who kept it leaves, when two people edit different copies, or when nobody updates it after using the last bottle. If you are moving to an inventory app — StockVial or any other — this checklist will save you a weekend of clean-up later.

1. Pick one freezer or one shelf to start

Do not migrate the whole lab at once. Pick the place people open most, usually the −20 °C freezer or the shared reagent shelf. Get that one right, let the lab use it for two weeks, then move the rest. A small complete list is more useful than a big half-finished one.

2. Clean up names and add catalog numbers

Spreadsheets collect three spellings of the same product. Before importing:

• Use one name per product (for example Tris base, not Tris, TRIS and Trizma).
• Add the manufacturer and catalog number wherever you can. They are what an app uses to tell products apart, and what you need when you reorder.
• For chemicals, add the CAS number — your safety office will ask for it eventually.

3. One row per container group, per place

If you have two bottles of the same lot in the same freezer, that is one row with quantity 2. If one bottle is in the freezer and one is in the cold room, that is two rows. Apps track where things are, so the spreadsheet should too.

4. Decide your locations before you import

Write down the places you actually use — Freezer −20 °C, shelf 2, Cold room, Flammables cabinet — and create them in the app first. Then make the spreadsheet's location column use exactly those names. In StockVial, rows with a location that does not exist yet are imported without a location (it does not invent new places from typos), and you can assign them afterwards.

5. Make dates boring

Expiry and opened on dates in a spreadsheet come in every format. Pick one — 2027-06-30 is the safest — and convert the column before you import. Leave the cell empty rather than writing n/a or ?.

6. Import, then read what was skipped

Most tools let you match your columns to theirs and show a preview first. In StockVial you upload an .xlsx or .csv file (up to 10 MB and 5,000 rows), match the columns, and see the first rows before anything is saved. Rows with a problem — an empty name, a quantity that is not a number — are skipped and the rest go in; you can download the skipped rows as a CSV, fix them and import just those. Do not import the same file twice: it adds the stock twice.

7. Label as you go

The list stays correct only if recording a use is faster than ignoring it. Print a QR label for each bottle as you put it in its place, so the next person can scan it and tap Used up 1 or Move in a few seconds instead of opening a spreadsheet.

Ready to try? StockVial's free plan covers two people and up to 100 items — enough for step 1. Start free, or look around the demo first. If your list is mostly chemicals, our free EHS chemical inventory template is a good way to clean it up before importing.