Inventory management software for factories

The key facts

• The three-stock problem: raw materials, work in progress, finished goods — and the recipe (bill of materials) is the thread between them.
• The floor questions: what can we run today (shortage checks), what did we make (batches with use-by), what did it cost (mass balance and trace).
• BSimple's coverage: multi-level recipes with versioning, production runs with shortage checks, batch creation with use-by dates, mass-balance reporting — all in core plans.
• The ERP line: MRP-style scheduling across constraints. BSimple deliberately does not cross it.
• Context: the full inventory system holds the wider system, this page one stop in it.

What factory inventory actually involves

A factory's inventory is not one list but a flow. Raw materials arrive against purchase orders and sit in stores with their own traceability needs — lots, expiry where they perish, supplier history. Recipes — multi-level bills of materials — define what each product consumes, including sub-assemblies built from other sub-assemblies. Production runs convert the first into the third, consuming materials, creating finished batches, and generating the questions regulators and customers ask: which lots went into this batch, until when is it good, what is the mass balance for certification. Work in progress is the honest accounting of what is half-made between the two.

Spreadsheets fail here in a specific way: the recipe changes (a version bump), the run changes (a half batch), or the yield changes (waste), and the three stock lists quietly stop agreeing. The software's job is to keep them as one flow, not three.

How BSimple covers the floor

We build BSimple, so weigh that. The production machinery is core, not a module: multi-level recipes with versioning, so a formula change is recorded history rather than an overwrite; production runs with shortage checks, so a run starts knowing it can finish; batch creation with use-by dates, so finished goods carry their identity forward; mass-balance reporting, used by organic-certified producers reporting against ACO, NASAA and OFC; and traceability search that answers "which lots went into this batch — and which customers received it?" in both directions. Around the floor: purchase orders raised from demand against reorder levels, live quantities across stores and warehouses, stocktakes, and the accounting handoff to Xero or MYOB with payment status mirroring back.

Plans run $180/$250/$399 per month AUD with all of it included — no manufacturing surcharge. Production and inventory together covers the recipes angle, real-life inventory examples shows the flow in context, and the trial runs one of your real recipes end to end.

The honest boundary: where ERP begins

BSimple is not an ERP and does not schedule: there is no MRP engine planning weeks of production against capacity constraints, no shop-floor machine integration, no HR inside the system. For factories whose problem is planning — finite capacity, sequenced changeovers, multi-week schedules — that is ERP territory, and we would say so in the demo rather than after the contract. For factories whose problem is the record — knowing what is on hand, what a run consumed, which batch went where, and when to reorder — that is exactly the job BSimple does, without an implementation project in front of it.

The test that separates the two: write down whether your pain is "we do not know what we have and what it became" (record — ours) or "we cannot plan the schedule" (planning — theirs). The ERP comparison draws the line in full, and the trial settles the record question on your own bill of materials.