Lab Inventory Management Best Practices [Free Inventory Template]

Poor inventory management creates a ripple effect throughout your lab, from missed deadlines due to unexpected stockouts to wasted inventory from expired reagents.

For growing laboratories, these incidents aren't just frustrating—they can derail research timelines, compromise quality control, and strain client relationships. 

While the needs of your lab may be complex, especially at scale, you can make a surprising amount of progress by following a simple set of best practices to manage, review, and organize your inventory. From spreadsheets to software, there are many tools at your disposal to make things even simpler. 

In this guide, we'll provide a framework for managing inventory in your lab and share the best tools for the job.

Why Inventory Management Matters

We don’t need to belabor the point that keeping an eye on supplies is important. 

Still, many labs fail to realize that good inventory management matters for much more than simply knowing the number of reagents in stock at any given moment.

Proper inventory management matters for labs for the following reasons:

• Safety and compliance: Good inventory management ensures proper tracking and documentation of hazardous materials and meets regulatory requirements
• Cost control: Costs can easily run wild without proper inventory management. An accurate understanding of inventory prevents waste from expired materials and unnecessary duplicate purchases while optimizing purchasing decisions
• Efficiency: There’s little worse than a slowdown because your lab ran out of something. Inventory management keeps experiments and tests on schedule by ensuring supplies are always available. 
• Resource optimization: You can maximize limited lab space and budget while keeping equipment properly maintained
• Quality control: Good inventory management helps maintain material traceability through lot tracking and ensures proper storage conditions.

Clearly, inventory management is important to the success of your lab. Manual methods like pen and paper quickly become out of date (not to mention error-prone) and simply will not do.

What to Consider When Managing Lab Inventory

If you’re starting from zero, then you’ll need to work your way up to an organized process for inventory management. In the meantime (and to help unblock you), you can start by answering the following questions and keeping a running record of them:

• Which items are needed?
• What is the frequency of using each item?
• What are the expiration dates of each item?
• What does each item cost?
• How much space does each item take?
• Who is responsible for tracking and re-ordering?

We can’t stress this enough: It’s important to have an inventory management process to keep your lab running smoothly and prepare for regulatory compliance standards. While paper records or spreadsheets do have shortcomings (more on this later), they’re better than a loose process. 

Tips for Minimizing Human Error

It’s estimated that data entry rates are as high as 26.9% in clinical labs, leading to numerous downstream effects that slow labs down and put them at risk of non-compliance. 

Even if your lab is in a different industry, chances are that somewhere during the da,y a number is inputted incorrectly (or someone on your staff has less-than-stellar handwriting). With inventory coming into your lab, being used, and being re-ordered, one fat finger could be the difference between a properly stocked lab and a complete halt on your work. 

To minimize these human errors, you can:

• Standardize and digitize your records. As we said above, a digital and standardized process will take you quite far if you are starting from scratch.
• Validate data. This will require software as most spreadsheets have limited/no data validation, so check out our recommendations later on.
• Scan barcodes for automated data entry. You can eliminate human error entirely through automated scanning of each item that enters your lab. 

We’ll explore some of these features later on as we share the best tools for inventory management.

10 Keys to Good Lab Inventory Management

There’s quite a bit more to pack into inventory management best practices than 10 tips; however, if you need to start somewhere, the following best practices are the best place to start:

• Take stock of your lab inventory: Start by assessing the baseline of all materials, equipment, and consumables currently in your lab. Document quantities, locations, and conditions as you do this.
• Establish a system for managing inventory: Set up an organization system that includes clear storage locations, categorization methods, and protocols for recording item movements, ensuring everyone follows the same procedures.
• Regularly monitor inventory: Implement scheduled checks of stock levels. Focus particularly on critical items and frequently used supplies to prevent stockouts and maintain optimal working quantities.
• Pre-plan your labeling: Set up a consistent labeling system that includes essential information such as receipt dates, expiration dates, and storage conditions, making items easily identifiable and traceable.
• Develop internal SOPs: Create detailed standard operating procedures that outline specific processes for receiving, storing, using, and disposing of materials, ensuring consistency across all lab personnel.
• Regularly audit inventory: Schedule periodic reviews to verify physical inventory against records to identify discrepancies, assess item turnover rates, and adjust ordering patterns accordingly.
• Adopt a tracking system or software: Implement a reliable inventory management solution, whether digital or manual, that can track usage patterns, generate reports, send automated alerts for low stock, and maintain historical data for analysis. We’ll share our recommended products for this later on.
• Implement a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) policy: Set up a process for using older materials and reagents before newer ones to minimize waste and ensure quality control across all testing procedures.
• Create emergency stock thresholds: Define minimum stock levels for critical items and maintain an emergency supplier list. This prevents stockouts and ensures your staff has all the materials they need. 
• Cross-train staff on inventory procedures: Ensure multiple team members are proficient in inventory management tasks, including receiving, documentation, and software usage, to maintain consistency during staff absences and reduce the risk of system breakdown.
• Establish vendor management protocols: Develop strong relationships with key suppliers, maintain a vendor evaluation system, and set up backup suppliers for critical items to ensure reliable access to quality materials while managing costs effectively.

As you can imagine, there’s a bit more to inventory management than keeping a loose read on your stock levels. 

You need to consider usage and expiration dates, orchestrate the materials in your lab and your staff, and forecast orders to ensure you minimize slowdowns. You have a few tools at your disposal to make things easier, which we’ll cover next. 

The Best Tools to Manage Lab Inventory

There are three categories of tools available to labs for inventory management. We’ll start with the basic/free options and explore more advanced solutions as we go down the list:

• Pen and Paper
• Spreadsheets
• Software

Pen & Paper for Lab Inventory Management

The simplest place to start is with pen and paper. For decades labs got by just fine using pen and paper to document inventory levels and plan orders. While that is true, it does not make pen and paper the ideal solution for modern labs today. 

For one, labs are processing far more data from a diverse set of places making physical paper copies a poor way to scale and share information from your team. Physical inventory management is also subject to entry errors and poor handwriting while being difficult to secure – a fire, flood, or misplaced sheet can put you at risk of non-compliance and slow down your lab. 

For labs today, digital solutions are a necessity. 

Spreadsheets for Lab Inventory Management

The first step to digitizing your lab’s inventory management is to start using spreadsheets – either Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets (or something similar) will work. Spreadsheets offer a digital solution that makes it easier to share data and collaborate; however, they still have a few downsides. 

It’s not that spreadsheets don’t work for labs– it’s just that they don’t work particularly well, especially if your workflows become complex or you have a distributed team. 

While Excel and Google Sheets are free, they lead to:

• Manual data entry increases error risk
• No audit trail or user accountability tracking
• Lack of support for complex workflows
• Version control issues
• No connection to equipment or instruments
• Limited security features for sensitive materials

Tasks as basic as knowing the supply of a reagent quickly become much more challenging than they ought to be when you rely on spreadsheets for everything. Learn more about how a LIMS is superior to spreadsheets for lab management.

Software for Lab Inventory Management

For modern labs looking to scale, there is no better solution for inventory management than software. There are two common platforms available to labs:

• ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook): An ELN functions as an electronic version of a lab notebook, allowing you to digitize and share lab records.
• LIMS (Lab Information Management System): A LIMS is a comprehensive platform to manage your lab’s data. Think of it as a CRM for your lab: you can monitor inventory, manage samples, log test results, and integrate your lab instruments and other software platforms. 

Between the two, we’d recommend a LIMS. Here’s why:

• More robust feature set: A LIMS is a much more comprehensive and complete platform for inventory management than an ELN, which functions more like an electronic version of a lab notebook. 
• Automations and workflows: A LIMS supports configurable automations to automate routine tasks and workflows. From usage alerts to automatic re-ordering, you can rely on a LIMS to run in the background while your staff focuses on critical tasks. 
• Built-in QMS for compliance support: For those looking to meet regulatory standards, your LIMS can integrate with or may have a built-in QMS for robust compliance support. 

The Best LIMS for Lab Inventory Management

Which is the best LIMS for inventory management? We’d suggest QBench!

According to G2’s Top LIMS Rankings, QBench is the best LIMS in 2025 and won the Momentum Leader badge for the Lab Inventory Management category in the Winter 2025 G2 Reports. QBench is flexible enough to adapt to any workflow without being overwhelming or requiring custom code.

QBench offers:

• A RESTful API
• Unparalleled flexibility through no-code automations
• Numerous software and instrument integrations
• A built-in QMS

And much more. QBench laps the competition on the pace of product improvement by releasing product updates every three weeks, many of which contain new features that customers requested. 

When you choose QBench, you're not just choosing a LIMS but a partnership that will grow with your lab. Partner with QBench to keep your lab at the forefront of innovation.

Download the Free Lab Inventory Management Google Sheet Template

Inventory management isn’t something to save for the last minute, it’s a core competency of a successful and compliant lab. 

Proper inventory management ensures that your lab is equipped with everything it needs every moment of the day, that stock is never wasted due to missed expiration dates, and that slowdowns are rare. 

If you have an informal inventory management process, let’s make it simple. We designed a Google Sheet template pack that you can start using to improve your lab’s processes right away. We based this spreadsheet on inventory management processes from real lab managers and know that it’ll give your lab the head start it needs to improve. 

Fill out the form below to download your free template.