Inventory Dashboard: What to Show and the Action Table to Build

An inventory dashboard should show six tiles at the top and one action table beneath them. The tiles give the state of stock in rupees and counts. The table lists every item that needs a decision today, with an owner. Put the table directly under the tiles, because the tiles only tell you whether to look.

Terms used on this page:

• SKU (stock keeping unit): one distinct sellable product variant.
• Days of cover: how many days the stock on hand lasts at recent daily demand.
• Projected cover: the same calculation, including stock already on order.
• Lead time: the days between placing a purchase order and receiving the goods.
• Dead stock: stock with no sales in the last 90 days and no movement of any kind (receipt, issue or transfer) for 90 days or more. This is our recommended cut-off. Lengthen it for slow, seasonal or spare-part items.

The column names come from the table built in the next section.

Keep two Excel tables: a stock table with one row per SKU and location, and a sales log with one row per sale or issue, including its location. Add six calculated columns to the stock table. Then filter the status column to anything other than OK and sort by days of cover. That filtered view is the action table.

Table "Stock":  SKU | Location | OnHand | OnOrder | UnitCost | LeadDays | LastMoveDate | Owner
                (LastMoveDate = date of the last receipt, issue or transfer)
Table "Sales":  Date | SKU | Location | Qty     (every issue: sales, production use, write-offs)

DailyRate  =MAX(
              SUMIFS(Sales[Qty],Sales[SKU],[@SKU],Sales[Location],[@Location],Sales[Date],">="&TODAY()-30)/30,
              SUMIFS(Sales[Qty],Sales[SKU],[@SKU],Sales[Location],[@Location],Sales[Date],">="&TODAY()-90)/90)
CoverDays  =IF([@DailyRate]=0,"No demand",[@OnHand]/[@DailyRate])
ProjCover  =IF([@DailyRate]=0,"No demand",([@OnHand]+[@OnOrder])/[@DailyRate])
AgeDays    =TODAY()-[@LastMoveDate]
Status     =IF([@DailyRate]=0,
               IF([@AgeDays]>=90,"Dead","No demand"),
               IF([@ProjCover]<=[@LeadDays],"Reorder",
               IF([@ProjCover]>120,"Overstock","OK")))
Value      =[@OnHand]*[@UnitCost]

How to read it:

• DailyRate takes the higher of the 30-day and 90-day rates. This is our recommendation, so that a recent surge triggers a review instead of hiding inside a long average.
• Reorder means stock on hand plus stock on order runs out before a new order could arrive.
• Dead needs both conditions: no sales in the last 90 days, and no movement of any kind for 90 days or more.
• Overstock at 120 days of projected cover is a placeholder. Set it by product, based on shelf life and how often you can order.
• Safety stock is not included. Add safety days to LeadDays for items where a stockout is costly. The reorder point formula shows how to size that buffer from real lead times.
• Owner and next action date make a row actionable. A row with no owner is a chart in disguise.

Yes. The same stock can read as healthy on a 90-day demand average and urgent on a 30-day one. In the worked example below, an item with 18 units on hand shows 6.0 days of cover on the 90-day rate and 3.6 on the 30-day rate. Against a 5-day lead time, only the 30-day rate flags it.

The SKUs are illustrative and the figures are our own calculation, not client data. Daily rate is units sold in the window ÷ window days. Cover is units on hand ÷ daily rate. Projected cover uses units on hand plus units on order. Stock value is units on hand × unit cost.

What the tables show:

• A-101 sold 150 of its 270 units from the last 90 days in the most recent 30 (56%): 5 units a day against a 90-day average of 3. The action table takes the higher rate, so A-101 reads Reorder. A day of stockout usually costs more than an early purchase order, which is why we recommend the higher rate.
• D-404 holds five units, which looks alarming in a quantity column. At 50 days of cover on the higher rate against a 10-day lead time, it needs nothing.
• C-303 ties up ₹24,800 (80 units at ₹310) with no demand in 90 days. That is 42.9% of the ₹57,860 across these four SKUs.
• E-505 has 81.8 days of cover on the shelf at the higher rate, which looks fine. With 200 units on order, projected cover is 136.4 days. Review the open purchase order before it lands.

A dashboard disagrees with the shelf because it can only show what has been posted. Late, missing or wrong-unit entries carry straight into every tile and every action-table row. Fix the posting first. A better chart will not.

Wrong units are the easiest case to miss. In a made-up example, a supplier ships 10 cartons of 12 pieces, so 120 pieces. Receiving records 10 units because no conversion is set. Sales then issue 100 pieces. The record shows -90 while the shelf holds 20. Our inference is that when count differences come in whole-carton multiples, units are worth checking before you suspect theft or loss.

Four tests you can run this week:

Receiving and counting routines are covered in how to manage warehouse inventory.

It sits alongside them. Dashboards and reports in TallyPrime and Business Central cover activity, stock position and reorder quantities. The action table adds days of cover against lead time and a named owner for each row. As of October 2026, their documentation describes the following.

• TallyPrime's Reorder Status report: closing stock, pending purchase orders, sales orders due, nett available, re-order level, shortfall and order to be placed. Its Stock Ageing Analysis has four default age ranges (0-45, 45-90, 90-180 and 180-plus days), which you can edit, for items maintained in batches.
• Business Central: a Power BI (Microsoft's reporting tool) Inventory app with 11 reports by item, location, lot (batch), serial number and bin (storage slot). Inventory value sits in a separate Inventory Valuation app with three reports.

Our 90-day cut-off is the start of Tally's third default age range (90 to 180 days). Nett Available is close to projected cover, in units rather than days, but it also subtracts sales orders due. In whichever tool you use, the cover-versus-lead-time column and the owner column are what you add.

Our recommendation is to stay in Excel while one person owns the stock table and every movement is posted in one place. Move to inventory software such as Arka Inventory when several people post movements, when stock sits in several warehouses, or when you need batch or serial control. Inventory software for small businesses explains what to look for.

We publish this page, and Arka Inventory was not among the tools compared here.

Arka Inventory's All-in-One Dashboard shows inventory, stock movement and performance across your locations, with minimum stock level alerts and custom reports. It covers the reorder, stock value and movement tiles above. Here is how we build each.

• Items at Reorder and stockouts. Set a minimum stock level for each item you want watched. Minimum stock level alerts fire on available and expected quantities, so stock on order is counted. They compare against a set minimum, not against days of cover, so set each minimum to daily demand × lead days from your action table, plus any safety stock.
• Stock value. Run our product family-wise inventory report to see available quantities and inventory values by product family.
• Movement irregularities. Open our monthly movements report, which shows opening stock from the previous month and closing stock for the current month, so irregularities stand out.
• Your own layout. Custom reports and dashboards let you build views around the data most relevant to your operations.
• Purchasing. Our forecasting and purchase automation links actual orders, sales forecasts and stock levels, so you can plan purchases and schedule purchase requisitions or purchase orders.

Arka Inventory is rated 4.8 out of 5 from 46 reviews on Salesforce AppExchange, as of October 2026. As of October 2026, our Basic plan, which includes multiple warehouses and inventory alerts, costs $199 a month, paid yearly.