Sortly

Sortly (https://www.sortly.com) is a simple-to-use inventory management system ideal for small businesses. It has a very intuitive user interface and a familiar file system-like structure. Folders can be created in any way the user likes, but our client had one folder for departments in his warehouse and then another folder for projects he was working on. When he needed to assign an item to one of his projects, he moved the item from the department folder to the project folder. Folders can also be exported into a PDF or Excel format which we used to generate inventory reports and invoices for customers.

Sortly has both browser and mobile app clients and each are good for different things. Our client uses the browser client on his office desktop computer for report generation, bulk inventory uploads, and managing users. The mobile app is great for employees who want to assign items to projects because it has a built-in barcode/QR code scanner.

Sortly has three plans you can choose from. For very simple needs they have a free tier which is restricted to 100 items and 1 user license. Our client went with the middle, “Advanced,” tier that allowed up to 2,000 entries, 3 user licenses (enough for an account for him with elevated privileges and another account for employees to share), custom QR code labels, and alerts for when inventory levels fell below certain thresholds. The Advanced plan is $39/month. The final plan is the “Ultra” plan at $99/month and allows for unlimited entries, 5 user licenses, and access to their API for custom development.

Sortly is great for smaller operations prioritize ease-of-use over other considerations such as robustness of feature set or security. If the features that the client needs are met with Sortly then it comes highly recommended. One downside we ran into was that the customer support is not the best we’ve ever encountered but when we did run into a billing issue we were able to work it out with them over email.

Pros:

-Easy to use

-Intuitive UI-Inventory stored in the cloud so no local storage configuration required

-Mobile app is very goodCons:-Limited to 100 or 2,000 items in the system unless you go with the most expensive plan

-Customer service is limited to a chatbot on the website and email-May not be suitable for very large inventories

Features:

-Custom barcode/QR code generation and actions (such as moving an item from one place to another) can be tied to a code scanfrom the app-Bulk inventory upload from a CSV or Excel file if your client already has their inventory stored in some other system

-Automatic alerts when inventory levels fall below a predetermined threshold

-Different privilege levels can be assigned to different users

-Activity tracking shows which user did which actions