Lagerbestand Excel Vorlage: The Cold Stall at 6:40 am

2026-10-23

It is 6:40 on a Saturday morning in December. Your fingers are numb. The van is parked behind the church, and you are carrying crates across the frozen cobbles to your stall.

You make tea blends and sell them in small tins. There are twelve kinds, and one of them, the orange-and-clove one, sells more than the other eleven put together. You have lined up the tins in your head all week. Orange-and-clove goes at the front, left, where the first customers walk past.

You open the last crate. It holds cinnamon, chai, and the mint nobody buys.

No orange-and-clove.

You check the van. You check the crate again, as if the tins might have been hiding underneath the others. Then you stand there in your gloves and do the sum from memory. I had about forty in October. I sold some at the autumn fair. I filled three online orders. Didn't I reorder? I was going to reorder.

You can't remember. That is the worst part.

The thing nobody sees

The stall will look lovely by nine. Fairy lights, a hand-written sign, a bowl of sample cups. Customers will say how cosy it is, and they won't know that you spent the whole set-up with a small knot in your stomach.

The knot isn't about the tea. It is about not knowing.

You don't know what is in the back room, what is on the shelf at home, or what is still on its way from the supplier. Some of it is in a notebook, some in an old spreadsheet with three tabs you stopped updating in August, and some only in your head, which is also holding your tax deadline, your mother's birthday and the stall fee.

So you do what many small shop owners do. You guess, and you hope the guess is close enough.

Mostly it is. Then one Saturday it isn't, and the best-selling tin is a gap on your table, and you are explaining to a woman who drove forty minutes for it that you are so sorry.

What it quietly costs

The lost sale is small. You'd earn it back in a week.

The bigger cost is how a good business starts to feel. You begin to dread the busy days, because busy days are when a gap shows. You over-order the safe flavours "just in case", and money sits on a shelf as chai that won't move before spring. You under-order the favourite because last time you were left with too much. You get it wrong in both directions and call that experience.

And there is the Sunday evening count. You stand in the storeroom with a pen and a torch, counting tins, writing numbers on the back of an envelope, and thinking that a real shop must have some better way to do this.

It probably does. You just never had a free afternoon to build it.

The moment it turns

Imagine the same Saturday, only a little different.

On Thursday you spent two minutes with a simple sheet. It showed every tin you sell with the number on the shelf. Orange-and-clove sat in a line that had gone amber, meaning it was getting low. Next to it was a short note saying it was time to order from your usual supplier. It wasn't an alarm, only a quiet nudge.

You placed the order on Thursday. The tins arrived Friday afternoon. Saturday at 6:40 you open the last crate, and the orange-and-clove is there, smelling of orange peel and warm cloves.

Your hands are still cold, but nothing else is wrong.

A normal Monday, afterwards

This is the part that surprised people more than the saved Saturday would. After a system like that, Monday is ordinary.

You open the file with your coffee and look at it for a minute. Two things are running low, and one supplier order is ready to send. That is the whole job. There is no envelope, no torch and no sinking feeling in the storeroom.

When stock comes in, you add it. When something sells, you take it off. It is a small habit and it takes a few minutes. The reward is that the shelf stops surprising you, and you can plan a week instead of reacting to one.

You might even answer a customer's "Do you have this in stock?" with a plain yes or no, without going to check.

If that sounds like your storeroom

We built a template for exactly this: the Lagerbestand & Nachbestell-Tracker. It is an Excel file with an item list, stock in and out, a reorder level for each item, order suggestions per supplier, and a simple dashboard. It comes with sample data, so you can see how it works before you enter your own. It is in German, so it suits you best if you run your shop in German.

It is an organising tool. It won't make business decisions for you, but it will show you the numbers. The 30-day money-back promise applies: if it doesn't help, you get a full refund, no questions.

Take a look at the Lagerbestand & Nachbestell-Tracker

Here's to cold mornings when the crate holds exactly what you expected.

An illustrative story, written with AI assistance.