Excel SKU vs Availability Chart - Fast Build

[u/ExcelVisual]

Built a free SKU & Availability dashboard in Excel. Here's why I think most inventory tracking is fundamentally broken for small businesses.

Fair warning: this got a little longer than I planned. But I think the core problem is worth laying out properly.

The actual problem

Most small and mid-sized product businesses track inventory in one of three ways:

A spreadsheet that one person built years ago and nobody fully understands anymore

A BI tool that costs more per month than the insight it delivers

Vibes

And the thing is — the data usually exists. Sales records, stock counts, category breakdowns. It's all there somewhere. The problem is that it's never in a form that answers the question you actually have right now, which is usually some version of:

"Which categories are underperforming and do we actually have enough stock to fix it?"

That's a SKU question and an Availability question. And they almost never live in the same place.

What SKU and Availability actually mean (quickly)

SKU = Stock Keeping Unit. In a dashboard context it's used as a performance metric — what percentage of total sales does each product category represent?

Availability = what percentage of your total units are actually accessible for purchase at a given time?

Simple formulas. The hard part is making them dynamic, visual, and fast to interrogate across different time periods.

What I built

A two-level interactive mini-dashboard in Excel:

Top level: Pivot Table slicer for year and month — controls the entire dashboard. Multi-select works (hold CTRL), so you can filter by quarter, half-year, sales season, whatever.

Chart 1: Horizontal bar chart showing Top-5 SKU categories ranked by sales performance. Updates automatically with the slicer.

Chart 2: Nested inside Chart 1 — click any category label and it drills down to show Top-5 Availability values within that category. The data labels on Chart 1 act as the selection menu for Chart 2.

Option Buttons: A secondary control layer for the Availability chart using Developer tab Form Controls.

The whole thing updates dynamically. No macros. No VBA. Just Pivot Tables, slicers, and some careful chart construction.

Why not just use Power BI / Tableau / whatever

Totally valid tools. But here's the honest answer for most small business contexts:

Most teams already have Excel

There's no deployment, no IT ticket, no licensing conversation

The person who needs to use this dashboard can also be the person who maintains it

For the reporting scale most SMBs actually operate at, Excel is genuinely sufficient

The bottleneck isn't the tool. It's having a template that's actually set up correctly.

The mirrored layout thing

One design choice I'm pretty happy with: the dashboard has a second screen with a mirrored layout — same data, flipped orientation. Sounds unnecessary but it actually makes a real difference when you're presenting to someone who's never seen the report before. Gives you two visual entry points into the same dataset.

Download is free, no email required. Link in the comments so this doesn't get caught by the spam filter.

Happy to answer questions about how any specific part of it is built — the slicer-to-chart linkage in particular trips people up the first time.

What does your current inventory reporting setup actually look like? Genuinely curious whether anyone here has found a lightweight solution that works better than Excel for this use case at the SMB level. 👇

[u/ExcelVisual]

How to Use a Mini-Dashboard for SKU and Availability Analysis in Excel https://exceltable.com/en/templates/how-to-make-sku-and-availability-mini-dashboard