On Fri, 2023-09-15 at 00:47 +0700, Frederic Muller wrote:

I've been looking for a inventory free software to track the mess I have in my workshop and haven't found anything able to "adequately" track shelves numbers and sub-divisions.

It seemed to be something very obvious for me, imagining big warehouses with shelves and cartons and people being easily able to find that carton full of .... that, in row 18, rack 99, shelve 3 inside section B. Well it is not. In fact warehouses are often treated as "locations" with nothing else in most cases.

Library software? Book (box) title, contents, shelf...

On Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:47:06 +0700 Frederic Muller fred@cm17.com wrote:

I've been looking for a inventory free software to track the mess I have in my workshop and haven't found anything able to "adequately" track shelves numbers and sub-divisions.

It seemed to be something very obvious for me, imagining big warehouses with shelves and cartons and people being easily able to find that carton full of .... that, in row 18, rack 99, shelve 3 inside section B. Well it is not. In fact warehouses are often treated as "locations" with nothing else in most cases.

So I am curious if anyone knows of any way (I thought of using the comment section but that's not really a great way to do it) to handle this, or any software if it exists?

Thank you very much for your insights.

It isn't a ready made solution, but this sounds like it is perfect for a relational database. The table has columns for each of the location characteristics, as well as a unique numerical key for each row, and an item description you can search on. When you want to find something you just run a sql query. Any application that performs this is probably going to do exactly this, except it will take the description of the item as input and create the query for you, returning the items that match. e.g. so, maybe there are several different types of bolts in inventory, but each of them has bolt in their description. When you run the query, the description and location are returned, and you can pick the one that you were looking for. The description can consist of several keywords, so you could also use a query that selects for two keywords to get an exact match. As you have probably figured out, the work here is all in the creation of the database, as every item has to be entered into the database. But, even with a tailor made application for this, you would have to do the same. And, you have to keep the database up to date, so if you replace an item in a location, you have to update the database to reflect that. Again, same with a tailor made application.

Pretty much any sql database will be able to do this, as it isn't using any sophisticated sql characteristics, like triggers or stored procedures. No atomic transaction considerations either if you are the only one using the database.