How to Organize Home Staging Inventory (Including a Home Staging Inventory List)

While every business can benefit from an optimized inventory management system, an air-tight strategy is especially critical for home stagers. That’s because home stagers often store furniture across multiple locations or display it at various sites across town for indeterminate amounts of time. After all, some houses are staged for a week; others, for months. 

The easiest way for a home staging company to take control of its inventory is to get organized—and a detail-rich home staging inventory list can help your business do just that.

In this article, we’ll outline the four steps to organizing home staging inventory. We’ll also provide a customizable home staging inventory list template to help you get organized. 

4 steps to organizing home staging inventory

Managing your home staging company’s inventory and assets doesn’t have to be a headache. Your team can streamline the process and save tons of time, stress, and money by following this four-step process:

1. Organize your physical inventory

Before you begin cataloging your inventory, you’ll want to physically organize your warehouses, storage units, or wherever you secure your home staging inventory. Don’t be afraid to rethink how you store, sort, and organize these items.

Some home stagers organize their inventory by decor style, while others prefer to sort items by furniture type. Figure out what works for you, and remember to account for how inventory is used. For example, you might move your most popular items to your most centrally located storage unit and then send the rest to a secondary warehouse. 

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2. Make a list of all your assets

Now that you’ve thoroughly organized your inventory, create a home staging inventory list: an exhaustive, detail-rich database of everything your home staging company owns, from faux orchids to cookie jars to king-size beds. 

Because your business is so visual, you’ll also want to include high-resolution images of each item in your inventory. However, keep in mind that adding images can be difficult if you’re using a document or a spreadsheet to track your inventory. Fortunately, modern inventory apps like Sortly were designed to be visual and can easily sync items to images.  

We also recommend creating categories and tags for your home staging inventory. For example, you might add tags that describe your furniture and decor, such as “midcentury modern,” “beach cottage,” or “modern farmhouse.” That way, you can sort your inventory list by these categories or tags to view all the available options for certain home styles. 

If you’re using an inventory spreadsheet, denote categories and tags in dedicated columns. 

You’ll also want to physically label all your furniture, ideally with a barcode or QR code, for easier inventory management. This asset tagging process will speed up many of your most common inventory-related tasks, including checking furniture and decor in and out of your storage spaces. 

3. Take inventory regularly

Whether using a sheet of paper, an inventory spreadsheet, or an inventory app, your home staging business should update your inventory records every time furniture or decor is checked in or out. After all, there’s no other accurate way for your team to gauge what items are available and where they are in real time. 

If you’re using an inventory app like Sortly, you can generate customized barcode and QR code labels to affix to your furniture and decor. Then, simply scan the label using your smartphone and update the location, condition, or other details of a given item. You can also instantly drag items to a project folder to clarify what inventory is installed at a given home.

4. Perform an end-of-year asset audit

Just about every business needs to conduct a year-end inventory count to ensure their physical inventory matches what’s accounted for on their inventory records. This is especially true in home staging, where inventory is moved around constantly and can easily be lost, stolen, or damaged during open houses or transit. 

While your team should monitor item condition as inventory returns from jobs, you can also verify item condition during an annual audit. To properly conduct an inventory audit, use your home staging inventory list, then compare that to the data you collect during a physical inventory count. Verify the quantity of an item, review wear and tear, and update pictures if necessary. 

This audit is also the perfect time to calculate and record depreciation for your assets, determine what items are no longer usable, and even calculate your inventory shrinkage rate. 

Home staging inventory list template

If you’d like to organize your home staging business but aren’t ready to try inventory management software, start with our home staging inventory list template. We’ve prepopulated the spreadsheet with some of the most common home staging items, but feel free to customize it.

If and when you’re ready, it’s easy to bulk upload this spreadsheet into Sortly’s inventory management software. 

About Sortly

Sortly is an inventory management solution that helps businesses track, manage, and organize their inventory from any device, in any location. Our easy-to-use inventory software is perfect for interior design businesses of all sizes, regardless of the type of inventory they track. Sortly seamlessly integrates inventory tracking into your daily workflow, allowing you to save time and money, satisfy your customers, and ensure the success of your interior design projects.

With Sortly, you can home staging inventory, assets, and supplies. It comes equipped with smart features like barcoding and QR coding, inventory photos, low stock alerts, customizable folders, data-rich reporting, and much more. Best of all, you can update inventory directly from your smartphone, whether you’re antique shopping, in the storage warehouse, or at a client meeting.

Whether you’re just getting started with inventory management or you’re an expert looking for a more efficient solution, we can transform how your company manages inventory—so you can focus on building your business. That’s why over 15,000 businesses globally trust us as their inventory management solution.