Excel, Google Sheets, Airtable or Worldwatch for a watch inventory

A dealer comes back from a fair on Saturday with six watches.

Getting them into his spreadsheet is an evening's work: a laptop, six references read off six case backs and typed correctly, six rows in the right tab, and the photographs still on the camera until somebody decided to put them online. So it happens on Wednesday. Or it happens late on Sunday with a reference or two typed from memory.

This is the part of dealing nobody chose. The trade is buying and selling, most of it done on a phone, in a hotel lobby or somebody else's shop. A laptop is where the fun goes to feel like a job.

And the cost of putting it off is opening the safe in March and finding a watch that you forgot you had.

What it looks like when nothing is "work"

There is a version of the same Saturday where the six watches go in from the passenger seat, as six photographs.

The purchase price, the supplier, the tax treatment and the paperwork can wait for a desk, or added directly in seconds. What is most important is the fact that six watches are in an administration and you feel calm. They are in stock on the day they were bought.

That is the difference, and everything below is an argument about which tools can do it.

Excel, Google Sheets or Airtable

A spreadsheet is a perfectly good way to hold a watch inventory, and a dealer who has run one for six years is not being careless.

The usual case against them does not apply here. Norway's sovereign wealth fund lost about $92 million in 2024 because a date was entered wrongly in a benchmark calculation. Standard Chartered was fined £46.55 million in 2021 after a cell showed a positive number for what were liabilities. Raymond Panko's 2015 review of 85 inspection studies “found errors in 94% of the spreadsheets studied”, the figure every vendor quotes. All of it describes financial models built by accountants, full of formulas. A watch inventory is a list, with almost no arithmetic in it and 180 rows against Excel's ceiling of just over a million.

What separates the three is narrower than the marketing suggests.

Airtable is the honest best of the three, and a dealer who has moved to it has already worked out what the problem is: it holds the photographs on the watch instead of in a folder, and it has a phone app. It is also the one that costs the most to keep going, because every improvement is one somebody has to build and then maintain.

Where all three stop

The watch that sells twice. A sheet has no connection to eBay, so a watch sold in the showroom stays live until somebody takes it down by hand. eBay's seller standards policy counts it as a transaction defect when “the seller cancels the order unexpectedly (e.g. because it was out of stock, or because they sold it to someone else)”. Sellers are evaluated on the 20th of each month. Stay under 2% of transactions and the account holds Above Standard. Go over 2% with defects affecting more than four different buyers and it drops to Below Standard, at which point eBay says items “may be placed lower in Best Match search results”, selling limits may fall and higher final value fees apply from the following month.

In Worldwatch that is automatic for sales on our partner marketplaces, or one easy switch. Marking a watch sold has “Take down active listings” on by default: marking it sold unlists it everywhere, including external channels, so you can't sell it twice.

The VAT column nobody finished. Most dealer sheets have a column that was added with good intentions and stopped being filled in somewhere along the way. When it is the VAT treatment of the purchase, it matters more than the rest of them together. Article 314 of the EU VAT Directive decides the margin scheme on how a watch was supplied and by whom, and that status follows the watch for the rest of its life. It cannot be rebuilt two years later from a bank statement and it costs your accountant a lot of billable hours to reconstruct.

€694.22 on one watch, decided by whether anybody wrote down who it was bought from. Recording an acquisition in Worldwatch carries the supplier as a linked contact with their seller type and VAT number, a margin scheme checkbox for second-hand goods, and the purchase invoice attached: the price, tax scheme, supplier, and paperwork all sit on the watch itself. A column can hold the answer. It cannot hold the invoice that proves it.

The 55 fields nobody types

A watch carries up to 55 individual fields in eight sections: identification, technical, case, dial, movement, bracelet, condition and scope of delivery. Two of those sections are required and the rest are not, which is the right way round.

Almost none of it is typed. Adding a watch from a photograph is the route the help page calls fastest: add one clear photo of the dial or case back. AI reads it to identify the watch and prefill the brand, model, reference, specs etc. Whatever it gets wrong is corrected on the spot.

None of that belongs in a tax file. Case material, lug width, bracelet reference and the condition of the bezel are what sells a watch, not what an inspector asks about. They are very important for ranking on external marketplaces and your own SEO though, one more reason to make sure every watch is complete, it simply is more visible.

Quarters

The accounting export comes out as one workbook, generated whenever it is asked for, from stock the dealer never had to put a lot of work in.

The export runs 41 columns, left to right in the order a transaction happens: SKU, status, brand, model, reference, condition and description, then purchase date, supplier, supplier role and VAT number, purchase invoice number and date, purchase net, VAT and gross, input VAT regime and whether it was deductible, and landed costs. Then sale date, disposal type, buyer with their role, VAT number and country, sales invoice number and date, tax scheme, sale net, VAT rate, VAT and gross. Then margin, margin VAT rate, margin VAT, margin net, profit and profit percentage.

The margin scheme is separated out: the file splits the margin, the VAT due on that margin and the net margin, so your accountant sees the VAT owed on the margin rather than on the full sale price.

The first sheet totals it. Items, sold, purchased, purchase net, VAT and gross, landed costs, sale net, VAT and gross, margin, margin VAT, margin net and profit, for the period, in one currency, with the date it was generated.

A dealer who keeps a spreadsheet builds that in January, out of the sheet, a bank statement and a folder of invoices. A dealer who photographed six watches in a car park on a Saturday in March presses a button.

Questions dealers ask

Is Airtable good enough? It fixes the two problems a spreadsheet has with photographs and with several people editing, and it has a phone app. It still does not know what a reference number is, cannot take a watch off eBay, and cannot decide a VAT scheme.

Does a watch have to be typed in? No. One clear photograph of the dial or case back identifies the watch and fills in the brand, model, reference and specs, and whatever it gets wrong is corrected on the spot.

Can a watch go in half finished? Yes, and for a dealer buying several at once that is the point. The photograph puts the watch in stock the day it was bought, and the price, the supplier and the tax treatment can follow at a desk.

Will an existing sheet import cleanly? Yes, and it's ready in minutes! The mapping is shown first, and nothing is written to your inventory until that final step. We are very happy to assist you if you're unsure.

What does it cost to hold stock in Worldwatch? Nothing. The free plan takes an unlimited number of watches with their photographs, purchase prices and paperwork, needs no card and does not expire. Publishing to a marketplace is where the paid plans begin.

Sources

Raymond R. Panko, “What We Don't Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today” (2015) — 85 inspection studies, errors found in 94% of the spreadsheets studied, read 28 August 2026.

European Spreadsheet Risk Interest Group, horror stories (Norwegian sovereign wealth fund 2024, Standard Chartered 2021), read 28 August 2026.

eBay, seller standards policy, read 27 August 2026.

Directive 2006/112/EC, Article 314, read verbatim on legislation.gov.uk 21 August 2026.

Worldwatch help: add a watch, manage your inventory, bulk import, record an acquisition, when a watch sells and accounting export, all read 28 August 2026.

The 41 ledger columns and the summary sheet are read from a generated Worldwatch accountant export, 28 August 2026. The €4,000 to €5,500 example is computed at the Dutch standard rate of 21%. Excel's worksheet limit of 1,048,576 rows is Microsoft's published specification.