Transcript
I am going to be showing you how easy it is to stand up your own inventory management software using Softr. Softr is one of my favorite no-code tools, especially for front-end interfaces and applications that you are launching internally or externally. When you need people to log in and have their own unique custom experience in your app, Softr is my go-to choice.
In this video, I am going to go through some examples on how you can set this up using a template and how we can enhance it using the Vibe-Coding block. We are going to go step-by-step, and it is way easier than you might imagine. Let's hop into my screen and start right inside of Softr.
Once you are signed into Softr, regardless of the plan that you are on, we can create a new app from a template. Softr has put together over 90 pre-built templates, allowing you to scroll through different types or search for exactly what you need. I am going to look for inventory and pull in the inventory management template.
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Note from Softr: While picking from our vast library of App templates is a fantastic way to start, another great option is our AI co-builder. You can simply prompt it with what you want to build, and it will instantly generate the complete app, pages, and database schemas for you!
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Before we actually install this template, we can start with the preview to check it out and see what it does. You can flip through the different pages of the template and see what everything looks like. For our use case, I am just going to select to use the template, and within a few moments, this template is going to be installed right into our Softr account.
I have some mixed feelings about templates. Sometimes they really speed me up, and other times I feel like they slow me down because a template is never going to be exactly 100% of what you are looking for. The whole point behind Softr and what it enables us to do is build our own unique apps customized to our workflow, our clients, or our team members.
When you build something in Softr by hand, you have full control over what you are building. When you use a template, very often there will be parts you don't need or things you wouldn't have built because that isn't how your workflow exists. For example, with this inventory management tracker, we are looking at sales orders, purchase orders, suppliers, and ultimately inventory.
Maybe what you really need is not something exactly like this template, but more of a check-in, check-out system. Or perhaps you need to track who has what laptop for tech purposes within your organization. This particular inventory management template doesn't exactly solve that specific need, so you will need to customize the end result.
Templates can do a lot of the lifting for us and get us pretty far, but don't expect them to be 100% of the end solution. There will always be a need to make some tweaks, changes, and updates. Let's take a quick browse through our template now that we have installed it by clicking on the preview in the upper right corner.
From here, we can choose who we are impersonating in the app. This is really important because these different users, which is all sample data, have different levels of permissions. They are assigned to different user groups.
This person at the top, Omar, is labeled as a warehouse manager, which is the user group he belongs to. It is very likely that in our template, we have different requirements or visualizations for the different members and roles within our team. Omar, as a warehouse manager, will need different permissions and visibility compared to his coworker who is a sales manager.
The sales manager will have a different experience from Omar because they fulfill different roles within the organization. This is a key thing to understand about building any app: recognizing the different roles within your org, who should see what, and how to apply different rules to these distinct users. Look at Omar's view as an example.
I am impersonating Omar, so I agree that if I make changes to my app, I am actually changing the underlying data. Omar logs in and sees the inventory, orders, reporting, and has the ability to look at revenue by customer, inventory levels, and revenue by sales rep. This is unique to Omar's experience as a warehouse manager.
Omar can go to inventory, sales, purchase orders, and suppliers to look at the different information available. He can see how many purchase orders each of these different suppliers has put in, or add a supplier through the form. All of this is entirely customizable, but the template included this information by default.
You might wonder where all this information lives. Frankly, that was all created for us at the data layer inside of Softr when we installed this template. The starting data was automatically created and put into the data layer for us.
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Note from Softr: We love seeing creators build their data foundation directly with Softr Databases. While Softr seamlessly integrates with external tools like Airtable or Google Sheets, using our native database ensures maximum performance and helps consolidate your tech stack.
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We can integrate our app with third-party tools like Airtable, SmartSuite, or Google Sheets. However, if you don't already have data living in those other tools, it makes perfect sense to just create the data directly in Softr. It will make your app load faster and give you fewer tools in your tech stack to try and manage.
All of these different tables represent the distinct components that were created for us, like products, sales orders, and the line items on the sales orders. We get the purchase order, the different line items on the purchase order, and ultimately the suppliers. All of this information lives in Softr on the back end at the data layer.
What people see, how they see it, and what they are allowed to edit, delete, or create is entirely driven by the permissions we grant our users. The different user groups we assign them to control their access when they are in the app. This takes us to the users tab, which currently contains sample data that we can clear out before going to production.
We can view all the different users in our app, track when they last logged in, and see what user groups they are assigned to. These user groups are assigned automatically, and you can see we have sales managers and warehouse managers. We can build additional user groups to give further details and control over permissions.
The last component here is Softr Workflows. This is where we can put together automations and processes that will happen within our app when users take certain actions. You can take automation to the next level to do a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes.
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Note from Softr: Implementing Softr Workflows natively is a game-changer. Keeping your automation logic as close to the design layer as possible reduces your reliance on third-party automation platforms and simplifies your entire architecture.
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Building automations within our workflows empowers our app and our users to get more done efficiently, serving as another key layer of Softr. Now let's head back to our interface, which is where we design the actual app itself. Let's imagine we are ready to spin up our inventory tracking right inside here.
I go to my pages, select the inventory page, and you can see that we are displaying a list here using a specific block. Every block in Softr is different; some present static data, while others pull dynamic data from our database layer. In this case, this particular block for inventory is a grid block.
We can add new blocks by navigating between existing ones and clicking add block, allowing us to choose from the different types available. We can include charts, a kanban board, calendars, an inbox, and all kinds of different ways to visualize data. When we are ready to bring in data from our database, that is where the dynamic elements come in.
If you are building a static block, like an image at the top of a page, that doesn't change based on data. We can also include layout containers, like side-by-side columns, to structure different blocks for even more reporting on the same page. In our case, we can make changes to our existing grid block or horizontal card block to fit our needs.
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Note from Softr: Need a visual component or custom layout that isn't available out of the box? We highly recommend using the Vibe-Coding block! If a native block doesn't quite fit your advanced requirements, simply prompt the Vibe-Coding block to generate the exact custom component you need, and it will connect to your database seamlessly.
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We can decide exactly what type of block it is and how we are displaying the data. We also configure it to pull data directly from the Softr application data layer that was created by our template. You tell the block where to pull the data from, typically configuring it one table at a time.
In this block, we are looking at products, and we can apply all kinds of different conditional filters to only include certain items. We can choose what content and information shows up on each of these blocks, like aligning the image, inventory level, product name, description, and units purchased. All of this information lives dynamically and updates instantly based on the data.
