How to Create an Inventory Dashboard in Looker
Trying to manage your inventory by just looking at your Shopify or warehouse admin panel is like trying to drive a car by only looking at the gas gauge. You know how much you have, but you have no idea how fast you’re using it, where you’re going, or if you’re about to run off a cliff. An inventory dashboard in Looker (now part of Google Cloud) gives you the full windshield view. This guide will walk you through exactly how to build one, turning raw inventory data into actionable insights that prevent stockouts and uncover hidden profits.
Why An Inventory Dashboard is a Game-Changer
Your e-commerce platform gives you basic numbers, but a dedicated dashboard in a business intelligence tool like Looker changes the game entirely. It’s the difference between seeing a list of products and understanding the story your inventory is telling you.
Here’s what you gain:
A Single Source of Truth: Instead of jumping between your e-commerce platform, warehouse system, and maybe even a few spreadsheets, a Looker dashboard pulls all that data into one place. This unified view ensures everyone on your team is working from the same accurate numbers.
Proactive, Not Reactive Management: Standard reports tell you what happened last month. A real-time dashboard tells you what’s happening right now. You can spot a product trending toward a stockout weeks in advance, not after you've lost thousands in sales.
Deep Financial Insights: You can see more than just unit counts. You can track inventory value, identify cash tied up in slow-moving "dead stock," and understand the true cost of holding unsold products.
Custom-Built for Your Business: Every business is unique. Looker lets you build reports that answer your specific questions, focusing on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your bottom line, not just the generic metrics a platform gives you.
Before You Build: Prepping Your Data for Looker
Jumping straight into building a dashboard without organizing your data first is a recipe for frustration. A great dashboard is built on a solid data foundation. Here’s how to prepare.
Step 1: Identify Your Data Sources
First, figure out where all of your inventory information lives. For most online businesses, this data is scattered across several places. Common sources include:
E-commerce Platform: Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, or WooCommerce hold your core product and sales data.
Warehouse Management System (WMS): If you use a 3PL or have your own warehouse, this system tracks receiving, location, and shipment information.
Spreadsheets: Many businesses use Google Sheets or Excel to track purchase orders, supplier information, or manual inventory counts.
ERP Systems: Larger operations might use systems like NetSuite or SAP for financials, which often include inventory modules.
The goal is to get all of this data into a centralized data warehouse that Looker can connect to, like Google BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift.
Step 2: Know Your Key Inventory Metrics
You can track hundreds of metrics, but focusing on a handful of powerful ones will deliver the most useful insights. Here are the essential KPIs for any inventory dashboard:
Inventory on Hand: The total number of units you currently have in stock for a specific product (SKU). This is your foundational metric.
Inventory Value: The total cost of your inventory on hand (Quantity on Hand * Cost Per Unit). This tells you how much cash is physically sitting on your shelves.
Sell-Through Rate: The percentage of inventory you sold during a specific period. It’s a crucial indicator of demand. Calculated as (Units Sold / (Beginning Inventory + Units Received)) * 100.
Days of Inventory Outstanding (DIO): How many days, on average, it takes to sell through your entire inventory. A lower number is generally better, meaning you're turning inventory into cash quickly.
Stock to Sales Ratio: Compares the amount of inventory you have to the quantity you’re selling. It helps you see if you're over or under-stocked.
Dead Stock: Inventory that has not been sold over a long period (e.g., 90 or 180 days). This is capital tied up in non-performing assets.
Step 3: Connect Your Data to Looker
Looker doesn't store your data, it queries it from a database or data warehouse. So, the most important technical step is to get your data from sources like Shopify into a warehouse like Google BigQuery.
Tools like Fivetran, Stitch, or Airbyte are designed for this. They act as a pipeline, automatically pulling data from your apps and loading it into your warehouse. For a Google-centric stack, you can use the BigQuery Data Transfer Service to connect directly to sources like Google Ads and even third-party apps via connectors.
Once your data is in the warehouse, a Looker developer uses LookML (Looker's modeling language) to define the dimensions (the data you group by, like 'Product Name' or 'Date') and measures (the numbers you calculate, like 'Count of Sales' or 'Total Revenue'). This model makes it easy for non-technical users to explore data without writing a single line of code.
Step-by-Step: Building Your Inventory Dashboard in Looker
With your data prepped and your model defined, you’re ready for the fun part: building the actual dashboard visualizations.
1. Start Exploring Your Inventory Data
In Looker, everything starts in the "Explore" interface. Think of an Explore as a curated starting point for asking questions about a specific topic, like 'Inventory' or 'Sales'. Your Looker developer will have set this up for you.
Navigate to your inventory explore. On the left side, you'll see a list of all available fields (dimensions and measures). This is your palette for building visualizations.
2. Build Your First Tile: Current Stock Levels by Product
This is the most fundamental chart. You need to know what you have and how much of it.
In the left-hand panel, find and click on the Product Name dimension.
Next, find and click on the Quantity on Hand measure.
Click the Run button.
Instantly, you'll see a data table with your products and their current stock levels. To make it more visual, click the "Visualization" tab and select a bar chart to easily compare levels across different products. When it looks right, click the gear icon in the top right and select "Save to Dashboard."
3. Create a Key KPI: Sell-Through Rate
Sell-through rate often requires combining a few metrics, and you can do this on the fly with a Table Calculation.
Start a new analysis in your Explore. This time, add Product Category, Units Sold, and Units on Hand at Beginning of Period. Run the query.
Click the "Calculations" button on the data bar.
Create a new calculation and name it "Sell-Through Rate." Use the formula to calculate the metric. For a simple version using available fields, you might use:
${sales.count} / (${inventory.on_hand_quantity} + ${sales.count})
This calculates units sold as a percentage of total inventory available in the period.
In the "Format" dropdown, select "Percent."
You'll now see a new "Sell-Through Rate" column in your table. Save this visualization to your dashboard as well.
4. Visualize Inventory Value Over Time
Understanding inventory trends is crucial for seasonality and budgeting. A line chart is perfect for this.
Clear your Explore and select a time-based dimension like Order Date. Use the filter to select a timeframe, such as "is in the last 90 days."
Next, add the Inventory Value measure.
Run the report and switch to a line chart visualization.
You can now see a clear trendline of how your inventory value has changed over the selected period. Notice any big spikes? That probably corresponds to a large purchase order arriving.
5. Identify a Problem: The Dead Stock Report
This report hunts down products that are costing you money. The goal is to create a filter that shows products with zero sales in a given period.
Start by selecting Product Name, Quantity on Hand, and Inventory Value.
Select the Sales Count measure.
Now, click the "Filter" button next to Sales Count. Set the condition to be "is equal to 0."
Add another filter for Order Date and set it to your desired dead stock window, like "is in the last 180 days."
Run the query.
The resulting table is a list of your most problematic inventory. These are the prime candidates for a sale, promotion, or liquidation strategy. Add this tile to your dashboard — it's one of the most actionable insights you can generate.
6. Assemble and Organize Your Dashboard
Now that you have several saved Looks (visualizations), it's time to pull them together. Create a new dashboard and add your saved tiles to it. You can drag and drop to resize and rearrange them. A good layout puts high-level KPIs (like total inventory value) at the top, with more detailed charts and tables below.
Don't forget to add filters! At the top of the dashboard, you can add filters like 'Product Category' or 'Warehouse Location' that will apply to all the tiles on the dashboard, allowing your team to drill down and explore the data for themselves.
Final Thoughts
Connecting your data sources and building a Looker inventory dashboard gives you a powerful, real-time command center for your business. It transforms inventory management from guesswork and manual data entry into a data-driven strategy that can protect your cash flow and increase profitability.
As you can see, the process in tools like Looker involves quite a few steps, often requiring technical help to set up data models before you can even start exploring. The learning curve is real. We built Graphed to simplify this process entirely. You can connect your Shopify or Google Analytics accounts in seconds, and then just ask in plain English, "Show me my top 10 products by inventory quantity" or "Create a chart of my dead stock value over the last 6 months." It builds the charts and dashboards for you — no models, explores, or table calculations required.