Guide / features
Inventory management software features
Feature lists are easy to inflate and hard to rank. Here is the honest ordering — which features change the operation, which merely decorate it — mapped against what BSimple includes in its core plans, and what it deliberately leaves out.
The features that change the operation
Movement-based stock with an audit trail. The foundation: every change recorded, quantities derived, history trustworthy. Without it, every other feature decorates a rumour.
Live multi-location quantities. On-hand, allocated and on-order per site, in real time — the end of the phone-call-to-ask-what-is-in-stock era.
Purchasing from demand. Reorder levels against live stock raising purchase orders, goods receipts updating stock on arrival, and price-variance flags holding supplier invoices to account.
Order fulfilment states. Orders as records moving received → allocated → picked → packed → invoiced → paid, with reservations that cannot double-promise and stock deducted at invoice approval.
Customer self-service. Ordering portals with per-customer product lists and pricing — the feature that removes the order relay entirely.
Counting discipline. Stocktakes as full EOFY counts or rolling cycle counts, with variances corrected as movements carrying reasons.
- 01The features that change the operation
- 02The features that matter for specific businesses
- 03What BSimple includes — and excludes
The features that matter for specific businesses
Batch and lot tracking with expiry dates and two-directional traceability — essential for food, beverage and materials businesses; the recall answer in minutes. Recipes and production runs — versioned bills of materials, shortage checks before a run commits, batches created with use-by dates, and mass-balance reporting for certification. Projects — inventory and on-site assets grouped under a customer: reserve without consuming, install and consume on invoice approval, warranty history after. Segments and tagging — customer and product tags driving reports and ordering-day campaigns. Platform access — browser-based, multi-user, alongside Excel (import) rather than pretending to replace it, with an API for the seams.
The rank-and-file features that sound bigger than they are: dashboards (a view of the record, covered here), mobile apps (valuable where scanning happens), and AI forecasting (a probability attached to a reorder rule, not a decision-maker).
What BSimple includes — and excludes
Included, in the core plans with no module paywalls: live multi-location stock, batches and traceability, purchasing with variance flags, ordering portals, recipes, production runs, projects, stocktakes, reporting including mass balance, and an integration surface — Shopify order import by webhook, a public REST API with scoped keys, and an MCP endpoint for AI assistants. Pricing is $180/$250/$399 AUD monthly, with every feature above in every plan and only capacity differing between tiers.
Excluded, deliberately and stated plainly: no counter point-of-sale, no HR or payroll, no native e-commerce storefront (the Shopify import is the storefront story), no tax filing — accounting stays in Xero or MYOB (US integrations rolling out). A feature page that hides its exclusions is selling you a discovery process; the full features overview and the trial — the full product — are the honest alternatives — and the inventory management guide holds the full pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
What features should inventory software have?
At minimum: movement-based stock with an audit trail, multi-location quantities, purchasing from demand with invoice matching, order states through fulfilment, and counting discipline. Business-specific layers — batches, recipes, projects — come next, matched to what the business physically does.
Which feature delivers the fastest payoff?
The end of re-keying: orders and invoices flowing on one record into the accounting system. It removes daily work immediately, while the deeper wins — cleaner counts, tighter purchasing — compound over months.
Is batch tracking necessary?
For anything with expiry, provenance or recall exposure — food, beverage, pharma, materials — yes, non-negotiable. For homogeneous durable goods, it is optional depth; buy it when traceability questions arrive, and BSimple includes it in the core plans either way.
Are AI forecasting features worth paying for?
Treat them as assists to a reorder rule, not replacements for one — a forecast is a probability, not a purchase order. The dependable core is live stock and reorder levels; the features that change the operation are cheaper and certain.
How can I check these features against my business?
In the trial — the full product: load your products, run one order through the whole path, one production if you make things, one count with a variance. An afternoon of that ranks features more honestly than any comparison table.
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