Guide / answers by room
Which software is used in warehouse management?
The answer depends on the room, not the trend: a storeroom, an SME warehouse and a distribution centre run three different kinds of software. Find your room here.
The short answer
- Storerooms and equipment pools run trackers: quantities and counts, nothing selling against the stock.
- SME warehouses run inventory systems with locations, allocation-backed picking and purchase orders — BSimple's category.
- Congested big rooms run dedicated WMS: slotting, wave planning, labour and automation.
- The line between them is congestion and commitment, not square metres.
- The wider system: inventory management end to end maps the whole record this page sits in.
- 01The short answer
- 02The rooms, and what runs in them
- 03How to tell which room you are
The rooms, and what runs in them
The storeroom — spare parts, uniforms, stationery — runs a tracker or a careful spreadsheet: quantities live somewhere, counts happen occasionally, nothing promises stock to customers. The SME warehouse — goods arriving from suppliers, orders going out daily, more than one pair of hands — runs an inventory system: locations, receiving against purchase orders, allocation-backed picks, cycle counts from a phone, purchasing signals. This is where the daily loop lives, and it is BSimple's home: one record under receiving, picking, counting and the invoices those picks become, from $180/month (AUD) with a free trial.
The congested room — multiple pickers working the same aisles, thousands of lines a day, storage optimisation and automation — is where a dedicated WMS earns its cost: slotting, wave planning, labour management. The trigger is congestion, not headcount: if picking works cleanly and the record is accurate, the inventory system is still the right tool. The warehouse software groups sort the market around exactly these rooms, and the type comparison covers the decision in depth.
How to tell which room you are
Three questions. Does anything sell against the stock? No — tracker. Yes — continue. Do orders allocate from live quantities today, or does someone eyeball availability? Eyeball — you need allocation, which is the inventory system's core. Is picking congested — multiple pickers colliding, paths needing sequence, storage needing optimisation? Yes — WMS conversation; no — inventory system. Answering those three takes five minutes and replaces an afternoon of list-reading, because the room type picks the category and the category picks the software.
Frequently Asked Questions
What software do most warehouses use?
By count, spreadsheets and channel tools; by suitability, inventory systems with locations and picking for SME rooms, WMS for congested ones. The room's workflow picks the category — then the product — and the three questions above locate the room.
Is a WMS better than an inventory system?
Different, not better: a WMS optimises a congested room, an inventory system records and controls the stock loop. Below congestion, the WMS adds configuration burden without changing outcomes; above it, the inventory system cannot sequence what the room needs.
Where does BSimple sit?
In the SME-warehouse category: locations, allocation-backed picking, receiving against purchase orders, phone-based counts, and the same record feeding orders, purchasing and the Xero or MYOB handoff — from $180/month (AUD). Deliberately not a WMS; the comparison page draws that line.
Can one business have rooms in different categories?
Yes — a main warehouse on the inventory system and a site shed on a count sheet is a normal phase. The system's locations keep the main truth; the shed graduates when it starts promising stock to anyone, which is the real boundary between the categories.
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