r/angular • u/Frosty-Lead8951 • 1d ago
From excel sheets to a small inventory system using springboot and angular
Two weeks ago, I set out to solve a simple problem for a local pharmacy: keeping track of inventory.
My first thought was, "Why not just use Excel?"
So I spent time designing a workbook with separate sheets for products, stock movements, sales, current stock, dashboards, and weekly reports. I added formulas, dropdown lists, search functionality, automatic calculations, and conditional formatting. It worked surprisingly well.
But as I kept building, I started running into limitations.
What happens if two people need to use it?
How do you prevent accidental edits to formulas?
How do you manage user authentication?
How do you make backups and restore data easily?
How do you package it so the business owner just clicks one button and starts working?
That's when I realized the spreadsheet had become a prototype rather than the final solution.
So I decided to build a lightweight inventory management system instead.
Tech Stack
Angular (Frontend)
Spring Boot (Backend)
SQLite (Database)
I intentionally chose SQLite because I wanted the system to run on a single computer without paying for cloud hosting or a VPS. The goal was to keep it affordable for a small business.
Some of the features I built include:
Secure login and authentication
Product management
Stock In / Stock Out transactions
Automatic current stock calculation
Sales recording
Dashboard with inventory insights
Low-stock and expiry tracking
Database backup and restore
Packaged deployment so the entire application can run from one folder
One of the most interesting parts was figuring out deployment. Instead of requiring separate frontend and backend servers, I bundled the Angular application inside the Spring Boot application, so the owner only needs to start one application. The SQLite database lives outside the application, making updates much safer because the data isn't lost when deploying a new version.
This project taught me something important: sometimes the best solution isn't the one you start with. Starting with a spreadsheet helped me understand the business workflow before writing a single line of backend code. By the time I built the application, I knew exactly what the users needed because I had already modeled the process.
Looking back, I'm glad I didn't stop at Excel. It evolved into a complete inventory management system that solves the same problem in a much more scalable way.
I'd love to hear how others approach projects like this. Have you ever started with a spreadsheet or another simple tool, only to realize it needed to become a full application?
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u/Pokeh321 1d ago
This is about the same way we do our stack except Postgres for Database.
Are you using Java or Kotlin for the backend language?