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jmarraztoa's avatar
jmarraztoa
Copper Contributor
Dec 20, 2025

Native FIFO Inventory Costing Function for Excel (Proof of Concept with LAMBDA)

Excel currently lacks a native function to calculate FIFO (First-In, First-Out) inventory costs when products are purchased at different unit prices and later issued in partial quantities. FIFO cost...
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PeterBartholomew1's avatar
PeterBartholomew1
Silver Contributor
Dec 24, 2025

jmarraztoa​ 

I suspect that most users' understanding of the options is still constrained by the limitations of the conventional spreadsheet.  Your work is interesting. You appear to have used recursion,  whereas I used SCAN working over a stacked and sorted array of inputs and outputs.

FIFO Lambda in Excel

The other difference is that you appear to have experience of FIFO and LIFO calculations whereas I had ideas for the solution but no experience of the problem!  I provided an option for selecting the form of presentation by allowing the user to switch between crosstab and list formats but with no specific end use in mind. 😒

Given a function that performs the FIFO calculation, it should be possible to go further, say by using the function within GROUPBY to build an array of functions that would calculate the results for multiple products or distinct geographical regions.  Either the entire set of results could be output as an array of arrays, or slicers could be used to down-select.

My feeling is that, this far, I have only scratched the surface of what is possible using modern excel.

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