inventory management within excel file

[Guest]

I work for an internet company that sells around 4000 products. Our
inventory is currently in an excel file. Whenever an order comes in via
email, we must go in and manually remove the items from the inventory. We
are looking for a way to have the inventory reduced automatically when the
email comes into our computer system. Do you know if excel is capable of
performing this function? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Will the excel file that we currently have our inventory in interface with
any shopping cart that you are aware of?
Roberta Wuerth

 

[Guest]

I'm 99% confident that you can do this. What needs to be done needs to be
done within your email client. I presume you're using Outlook. Specific
coding for handling incoming email help can be obtained over in the Outlook
help group.

But essentially you're going to look for emails coming in to the particular
address and then validate them to make sure they are orders - with whatever
handling of non-order emails taken care of in code also. Once you determine
that an email is an order, you'd have Outlook create an instance of Excel,
open your inventory workbook and adjust the inventory quantity (or deal with
situation where it involves a back-order or even doesn't match up with an
item you have in inventory).

An alternate method is to have an Excel workbook set up that contains code
to periodically create an instance of Outlook, look for new order emails and
update the contents of that workbook. That one could be linked to your main
inventory workbook to get current inventory. I had a setup like that once
using Access to check Outlook for new emails with Excel workbooks attached,
validate and extract data from those workbooks and stuff it into the Access
database. It all ran on an unattended system with a dedicated email address
that the emails/workbooks were sent to. But that's been some time back
(original development was in Office 97). For all I know, AT&T may still be
using that system - it used to handle about 400 emails a day from their
network engineers.