How to Build a Local Supply Chain Dashboard with Zero Budget

Enterprise supply chain software costs ₹50,000-5,00,000 per year. For a local distribution business with a turnover under ₹1 crore, this is absurd — the software costs more than the entire IT budget. But the alternative — managing supply chain data through memory, paper notes, and WhatsApp messages — leads to stockouts, overstock, missed order deadlines, and financial leakage that costs far more than software.

The middle path: a zero-budget supply chain dashboard built with free tools you likely already have access to. This isn't a toy — it's a functional system that handles 80% of what small distribution businesses actually need.

The Architecture: Three Free Tools

Google Sheets as the database: product catalog (SKU, name, category, unit price, supplier, reorder point), inventory tracking (current stock, incoming stock, reserved stock), order log (customer, products, quantities, dates, status, payment status), and supplier tracking (supplier contacts, lead times, order history). Google Sheets handles thousands of rows easily, provides real-time collaboration, and integrates with every other Google product.

Google Forms as data entry: instead of typing directly into spreadsheets (error-prone and messy), create Google Forms for: new order entry (warehouse staff fill in order details from their phone), stock receiving (when a supplier delivery arrives, scan or enter received quantities), and stock adjustment (for damages, returns, or physical count discrepancies). Forms enforce data validation (required fields, dropdown selections, number ranges) and automatically append data to the corresponding Google Sheet.

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) as the dashboard: connect Looker Studio to your Google Sheets to create visual dashboards showing: real-time inventory levels with reorder alerts, daily/weekly/monthly order volume and revenue, supplier performance (lead time trends, order accuracy), and customer analytics (top customers, order frequency, payment patterns). Looker Studio is free, produces beautiful visualizations, and auto-refreshes when the underlying Google Sheets data changes.

Setting It Up: Step by Step

Step 1: Create the product catalog sheet. Columns: SKU (unique identifier), Product Name, Category, Unit, Unit Price, Cost Price, Supplier, Reorder Point (minimum stock before reordering), Reorder Quantity (how much to order). Populate with your current product list — this is the one-time setup that makes everything else work.

Step 2: Create the inventory sheet. Columns: SKU, Opening Stock, Received (from supplier deliveries), Sold (from order entries), Adjusted (damages, returns), Current Stock (calculated: opening + received - sold ± adjusted). Use SUMIFS formulas to auto-calculate received and sold quantities from the order and receiving logs.

Step 3: Create the order entry form. A Google Form with fields: Customer Name (dropdown of registered customers), Product (dropdown from product catalog), Quantity, Delivery Date, and Payment Terms. Form submissions automatically populate an Order Log sheet, which feeds the inventory calculations and the Looker Studio dashboard.

Step 4: Build the Looker Studio dashboard. Create three pages: Inventory Overview (bar chart of current stock vs. reorder levels, table of items below reorder point), Sales Dashboard (line chart of daily revenue, pie chart of sales by category, table of top customers), and Supplier Dashboard (table of pending orders, average lead time by supplier). Connect each visualization to the corresponding Google Sheet. Set auto-refresh to hourly.

Limitations and When to Upgrade

This system works well for businesses with up to 500 products, 50 daily transactions, and 2-3 concurrent users. Beyond these thresholds: Google Sheets slows down with large datasets, concurrent editing creates occasional conflicts, and the lack of proper relational database features makes complex queries difficult.

When you outgrow Google Sheets, graduate to: Airtable (spreadsheet-database hybrid with better relational features), Notion databases (for teams that prefer all-in-one workspace), or a custom application built with your specific workflow requirements. The Google Sheets dashboard serves as a prototype that validates your data requirements — making the eventual upgrade to proper software a targeted investment rather than a speculative one.

Zero budget doesn't mean zero capability. A well-designed Google Sheets system with Forms for data entry and Looker Studio for visualization provides 80% of the supply chain visibility that enterprise software offers — at 0% of the cost. Start here. Prove the value of data-driven supply chain management. Then invest in purpose-built tools when the ROI justifies the expense.