Almost every inventory tool for small businesses is now a subscription: $30 to $90 a month, your stock list living on someone else's server, and the whole thing stopping the day you stop paying. For a business tracking a few hundred items, that's a strange bargain.
VenStock is the older one. You buy it once. It installs on your computer, keeps every item and every movement in a file you own, and carries on working whether or not you're online — and whether or not we're still around in five years.
The design borrows deliberately from a paper stock register: a ledger table, tabular figures for quantities and SKUs, and colour used only where it carries meaning — green for healthy, amber for low, red for out. The gauge bar per item is the whole point. You can scan a shelf's worth of stock and know what to reorder without reading a single number.
What's included
- Item register — name, SKU, category, quantity and reorder threshold per item
- Stock in/out entry with a running, timestamped movement log
- Low-stock alerts — a running count in the header plus gauge colouring, visible everywhere rather than buried in a report
- CSV import/export — bring in an existing spreadsheet, matched and updated by SKU
- Backup and restore, with an automatic safety copy taken before any restore
- Works offline — everything runs on your machine; the licence re-checks online periodically, with up to 14 days of offline use in between
Standard or Pro?
Both editions have identical features. The only difference is how they store data, and it's a difference most businesses will never notice:
| Standard — $29 | Pro — $49 | |
|---|---|---|
| Good for | The vast majority of businesses — typical periodic stock-in/stock-out entry | High-volume operations: many SKUs, very frequent entries, used continuously for years |
| Speed as data grows | Instant for years of normal use; may gradually slow once tens of thousands of stock entries have accumulated | Stays fast regardless of how much history builds up |
| Installation | No native components — never affected by antivirus or application-control policies | Includes a compiled database component; on a small number of machines with strict security software this may need a one-time settings change |
Honestly: if you're unsure, buy Standard. It's the right choice for almost everyone, and it isn't a crippled version of Pro — it's the same app, built to stay fast at the volume a typical business actually generates.
Free tools that pair with it
Counting stock is half the job; pricing it is the other half. Several free calculators here sit naturally alongside VenStock: Margin and Break-Even for pricing decisions, Sales Tax and GST / VAT for invoicing, Business Loan for financing stock purchases, and Commission if staff are paid on sales.