For many businesses, growth is how you stay competitive. But it also exposes weak spots in your inventory planning. As new products, channels, and locations pile up, the same small planning team takes on more and more. Suddenly, the trusty spreadsheet that handled 200 SKUs starts buckling under 500.
And growth isn’t slowing down. In Netstock’s 2026 Supply Chain Benchmark Report, 99% of SMBs surveyed launched new products, expanded existing ranges, or both, up from 93% in 2025.
So it’s fair to ask two questions before you choose an inventory planning solution. Will it keep up as we grow? And will our planning hold together when people leave, change roles, or join the team? This guide answers both, using real numbers from Netstock customers who’ve been there.
In short: Netstock scales with growing businesses by replacing spreadsheet planning with a structured, shared system. Customers like Redmond Life, ILIA Beauty, and Medshop have added SKUs, channels, and sales while keeping inventory under control. And because planning rules are stored in Netstock, where the whole team can use them, planning stays consistent when team members change.
Key findings
- Growth is near-universal, and so is the pressure it creates. 99% of SMBs surveyed for Netstock’s 2026 Benchmark Report launched new products, expanded ranges, or both.
- Redmond Life cut excess inventory by about 55% while growing 70–100% a year. Excess dropped from $6.2M to $2.8M, and planning effort fell by the equivalent of two full-time planners.
- ILIA Beauty doubled revenue while inventory rose only 30–40%. It grew from 200 to 500 SKUs and from 2,000 to more than 12,000 forecasts a month.
- Medshop grew sales by 38% with only a 16% increase in inventory investment, while improving product availability by 14%.
- Netstock handles real operational complexity. Customers include Bargreen Ellingson, with 25 warehouses, three distribution centers, and more than 2,000 suppliers, and Tarsus Distribution, which manages up to 20,000 SKUs across seven teams.
- Netstock reduces key-person risk. Classification rules, policies, dashboards, and forecasts are stored in one shared system, not in one planner’s spreadsheet.
- Netstock is built for SMBs and the mid-market. More than 2,500 customers worldwide use it to plan with the discipline of a larger business, without the weight of an enterprise suite.
Can Netstock keep up as your business grows?
Yes. Growth quickly shows where the weak spots are in a business, and inventory planning is often one of the first. If your team still plans inventory manually in spreadsheets, the pressure of more products, more suppliers, and more locations shows up fast: stock-outs on items customers want, excess stock of the wrong products, hours spent keeping everything up to date, and errors that creep in along the way.
Netstock replaces manual spreadsheet planning with a structured, automated, and intelligent planning system. It handles more SKUs, channels, and locations, so your planning team can take on more without needing to grow at the same pace.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- Every SKU gets attention, not just the ones someone remembers. Netstock recalculates risk for every SKU, every day, so your team knows immediately where the risk is without checking items one by one.
- Your team manages by exception. Dashboards flag the SKUs that need action, so planners spend their time on making the right decisions, not data wrangling.
- Your data refreshes automatically every night. As you add new products, suppliers, and orders in your ERP, Netstock picks them up in the nightly sync. There’s no need to rebuild spreadsheets at month-end.
Tradeware, an Australian hardware wholesaler with six warehouses, put it simply: “Our business experienced rapid growth, forcing us to realize that our existing processes would not keep up. The discovery of a purpose-built tool like Netstock was the game-changer we had been looking for.”
How much complexity can Netstock handle?
Scale isn’t only about SKU counts. It’s the combination of products, locations, channels, suppliers, and teams that makes planning hard. Netstock customers manage all of these at once:
- 25 warehouses, three distribution centers, and 2,000+ suppliers. Bargreen Ellingson, a food service and hospitality distributor serving the western US, Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada, plans a complex range where 40% of sales are custom items, demand is spiky, and events like Mother’s Day drive huge peaks. Since going live, Bargreen has reduced excess inventory by more than $2 million, cut stock-outs to a third of what they were, and improved fill rate by 5% on high-turn items.
- Up to 20,000 SKUs across seven teams. Tarsus Distribution, an IT hardware distributor in Southern Africa that manages up to 20,000 SKUs, replaced 25 years of spreadsheets with Netstock and rolled it out across seven teams. Before Netstock, the team started its forecasts from scratch every month.
- Distribution centers in three countries. Adventure Operations supplies 30 countries from distribution centers in Australia, New Zealand, and the USA. It moved more than 2,500 SKUs out of one large Excel file and cut excess inventory by over 30% in under 12 months, while keeping a 95% fill rate.
- Multiple warehouses with seasonal demand. Aquatic AV found that seasonality plus multiple warehouses was more than spreadsheets could manage. With Netstock, it can see inventory combined and per warehouse, reduced inventory holding by over $1 million, and lifted fill rate from 79% to 99%.
What does growing with Netstock look like in practice?
Three customer stories show the same pattern. The business grew, and Netstock helped keep inventory, availability, and planning workload under control.
Redmond Life: growing 70–100% a year, with less excess stock
Redmond Life, maker of Real Salt and Re-Lyte hydration products, grew from a mostly in-house manufacturer into a multi-channel business. It now works with four to five co-packers, multiple 3PLs, Amazon, Walmart, retail, and direct-to-consumer channels. Its finished goods range grew to 500+ SKUs, and inventory value rose more than tenfold between 2014 and 2025.
Spreadsheets and QuickBooks couldn’t keep up. After moving to Acumatica ERP and integrating with Netstock, Redmond Life now forecasts separately for each channel, and its warehouse teams rely on Netstock’s recommended transfers every week.
Between February 2025 and January 2026:
- Total inventory fell by about 26%, from $15.5M to $11.4M.
- Excess inventory fell by about 55%, from $6.2M to $2.8M.
- Planning effort dropped by the equivalent of two full-time planners.
All while the business kept growing.
“Netstock turned an unmanageable process into a structured, scalable one. I can’t imagine trying to do this with spreadsheets today; it would take more than a full-time person,” says Bronson Nemelka, Inventory Manager at Redmond Life.
ILIA Beauty: double the revenue, without double the inventory
ILIA Beauty, a beauty brand, plans from a central hub in Ohio with satellite locations in Canada and the UK. Since implementing Netstock with NetSuite in 2021:
- Its range grew from 200 to 500 active SKUs, and from 10 to 24 lines of business.
- Monthly forecasts grew from around 2,000 to more than 12,000.
- Revenue doubled, while finished goods inventory rose only 30–40%.
- Fill rate improved from 92% to 98%.
- A 4-hour forecasting task now takes 15 minutes.
That kind of volume would have been impossible to manage in Excel. With Netstock, the same team handles six times the forecasts.
Medshop: 38% more sales on 16% more investment
Medshop supplies medical products across Australia and the Pacific Islands, from low-value consumables to high-end hospital diagnostic equipment, across a number of warehouses and thousands of products. With Netstock dynamically adjusting safety stock based on forecast accuracy and supply reliability, Medshop achieved:
- A 38% increase in sales
- A 14% increase in product availability
- Only a 16% increase in inventory investment
In other words, sales grew more than twice as fast as the inventory needed to support them.
How does Netstock protect your planning when people change?
Every planning team knows the risk: one person understands the spreadsheet, and when they’re away, or they leave, that knowledge goes with them. This is often called key-person risk, and it’s one of the biggest hidden costs of spreadsheet planning.
Eustralis, a food service supplier operating across seven Australian cities, knew it well. Before Netstock, each of its branches ran its own spreadsheet. “Working in this siloed manner made it impossible for anyone else besides the ‘owner’ of the spreadsheet to work on it. If that person was unavailable, we had a problem,” explains Etienne Decuyper, Supply Chain Manager at Eustralis.
Netstock reduces key-person risk by storing your planning rules and knowledge in one system, where everyone can see and use them.
Your planning rules are stored in Netstock, where the whole team can use them
- Classification automatically sorts SKUs by value and sales velocity, so everyone works from the same view of which items matter most.
- Policy defaults and overrides set stocking rules once, and every planner follows them.
- Forecasts and item comments stay in the system, so new planners have the context they need.
- Supersessions link replacement products to the history of the products they replace, so that knowledge doesn’t depend on someone’s memory.
As Redmond Life’s Supply Chain Analyst Tanner Whitworth puts it: “Netstock acts as a safety net, so we don’t have to remember hundreds of SKUs or guess what to order or when, even as the business continues to grow rapidly.”
Everyone works from the same information
When planning is stored in one shared system, more people can find answers without relying on the planner. At Aquatic AV, “Other staff also have access to Netstock, so they can dive in and see all the information very quickly instead of asking us,” says Raffi Fills, Director of Operations. At Adventure Operations, planning, warehouse, logistics, sales, and product teams all work from the same data.
Administrators control who sees what, with full, read-only, or no access by location. That makes it easy to bring new people in and adjust access as roles change.
New planners get up to speed faster
When Tarsus Distribution rolled Netstock out across seven teams, it built a repeatable onboarding process: a dedicated Netstock champion, go-live dates shared three months ahead, and a scorecard covering seven key areas, with extra training for anyone who needed it. Netstock’s training videos did much of the heavy lifting.
“The videos and training are so good and well structured that they sorted out 90% of the concerns and questions,” says Helene Liebenberg, COO at Tarsus Distribution. Because users knew they couldn’t break anything, they started experimenting and became more proficient.
At Bargreen Ellingson, 25 warehouse managers now manage stocking policies rather than individual items. Netstock’s AI Opportunities also help new users contribute quickly: “Someone with no training can log in to Netstock on day one and do something useful. It gives them a sense of control and makes them feel successful.”
ILIA Beauty uses Netstock’s Learning Center videos to onboard new team members quickly. That kind of process gives you a ready-made path for every new planner who joins.
Planning stays steady through big changes
Growth often brings other changes too, like a new ERP. When Trim-Tex moved from Sage 100 to Sage X3 to support its growth, it had Netstock up and running within a few days of switching ERPs. Its planning carried on through the transition.
Is Netstock a fit for larger, more complex businesses?
Netstock is built for SMBs and mid-market businesses, and it’s designed to scale within that lane. It isn’t trying to be a heavyweight enterprise planning suite, and that’s deliberate. Growing businesses need planning discipline that works now and keeps working as they grow, without the cost, implementation time, and specialist teams that enterprise suites demand.
More than 2,500 customers worldwide use Netstock, including multi-country distributors, a distributor with 25 warehouses and more than 2,000 suppliers, and businesses managing up to 20,000 SKUs. For many of them, part of the appeal is that Netstock is proven with businesses bigger than they are.
As the team at Eustralis explains: “Those larger companies all have the same problems that we have, except on a larger scale, so if Netstock works for them, it will most certainly work for us.”
Purpose-built, and flexible enough for real-world complexity
Netstock works out of the box, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all. Custom policy overrides let businesses build their own rules and management approach into the system, tagging items and warehouses based on how they actually operate.
That flexibility was one of the reasons Bargreen Ellingson chose Netstock after a formal RFP comparing six solutions. Netstock also agreed to a phased, non-disruptive rollout, while competing vendors wanted upfront commitment and multi-year contracts. As Jacob Moody, CIO at Bargreen, puts it: “The Netstock interface makes a complicated space as simple as it can be. It empowers less tech-savvy users and improves adoption.”
The bottom line: Netstock grows with you
Growth adds complexity to your inventory planning: more SKUs, more channels, more locations, more suppliers, and more people. Netstock handles that complexity with a structured system that recalculates risk for every SKU daily, flags what needs attention, and stores your planning rules in one place. Customers like Redmond Life, ILIA Beauty, and Medshop have kept growing while reducing excess stock, protecting availability, and freeing up their planners’ time.
And when your team changes, your planning doesn’t have to. Your planning knowledge stays in the system, so new planners can pick up where others left off.
