Initial reaction

Wow, this appears to be exactly what I was looking for — and I have been looking for a long time. I have a very small business that sells self-published comics and I have been using an old legacy version of Quickbooks I purchased years ago for a PC and have been running on my Mac via Windows XP/Parallels Desktop. I’ve been looking for a way to move away from Quickbooks — in terms of features and price, Quickbooks is way more software than I need and not worth nearly $300 given my needs to upgrade to the Mac version. Keeping track of expenses is simple enough and doesn’t require Quickbooks, but tracking inventory and the ability to generate invoices/sales receipts and subtract sales from the inventory was essential to me.

It is shocking at how few options there are in terms of inventory management. All the alternative software and online options are not much cheaper — after all, it’s just a simple database, so I was surprised to see how few free/affordable apps were available.

I finally stumbled across minventory and, given the price, decided to download and check it out. I haven’t tested it in the field yet, but in the dummy transactions I’ve run to see how it works, it seems to be exactly what I need!! Instructions could be a bit clearer in the user guides, but it was enough for me to figure things out.

So far, two features I’d like to see are the ability to customize invoice/sales receipt layouts and the ability to customize the numbering conventions for invoices, purchase orders, etc.

But even based on what I’ve seen so far, I HIGHLY recommend this. At some point, it’s possible a small/growing business may outgrow inventory and need to move to Quickbooks (which, as I’ve said, also tracks expenses, payroll, and other items), but for a small business that deals with inventory which can sometimes be the most difficult part of managing a business, this is a good introduction to inventory management.

Randy at WCG about mInventory