Ever lose track of how much flour, sugar, milk, eggs, soap, razors, spices, motor oil, filters, nails, screws, glue, paper, staples, etc… you have on hand?

Ever shop based on hunger, rather than diciplined restocking?

Ever want to have an inventory of groceries at your house, so you don’t have to run to the store for everything?

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Our objective is to keep consistent inventory levels of common products around the house, so we never run out of things that we should have on hand.  To that end, I’ve been adding some basic household inventory tracking data to the Home School software.  It has (or will have) the following features:

• Areas — places that you store products (freezer, basement shelves, kitchen, bathroom, etc…)
• Items — each “thing” that you want to keep in a given area (flour, sugar, toothpaste, etc)
• Units — lbs, each, bottle, roll, case, etc…
• Min Quantity — minimum amount to have on hand
• Max Quantity — max quantity to have on hand
• Check every [] days — how often should this item be checked?

From that data, you will be able to pull the following information out of the system:

• All items and current inventory levels
• Graphs of inventory levels over time
• Which items (sorted by area) need checked now
• What needs refilled (eg, the container of sugar in the kitchen, from the big bags in the basement)
• What needs purchased (40 eggs, 24 rolls of TP, 10 lbs of sugar)

You will be able to pop on, print out a list of items that need inventoried, and hand it to the kids with a pencil and clipboard to go about filling out how much there actually is.  Excellent math practice, especially if you deal in raw units like oz, lbs, quarts, etc… — the students will have to add/multiply/convert the units that are on the items they are counting.

For Example, you could specify that you want 4 bottles of dish soap around, or 96 ounces of dish soap around.  The difference is that they will need to multiply 24 oz per bottle * 3 bottles on hand = 72 ounces — time to buy another bottle.

Here are some early screen shots: