Inventory manager

Orla Hi. The cargo hold is a mess. We're running out of things we don't know we're running out of and ordering duplicates of things we have plenty of. I need a proper inventory tool. Add items, update quantities, save everything to a file between sessions. Something the whole crew can actually use 📦

What you're building

Commands: add / update / list / remove / quit

> add
Item name: Widget A
Quantity: 100
Price: 2.49
Added.

> list
Widget A    qty: 100    £2.49 each    total value: £249.00

> update
Item: Widget A
New quantity: 85
Updated.

> quit
Inventory saved to inventory.json.

What you'll need

• Classes and objects — an Item class for individual products, an Inventory class to manage the collection
• Files and exceptions — saving to and loading from JSON, catching a missing file on first run
• Dictionaries and lists — the underlying data before and after class wrapping
• Numbers and arithmetic — calculating total value per item
• Control flow and functions — the command loop, one function per command

Hints

An Item is a class with three attributes. Name, quantity, price. The Inventory manages a list of Items and exposes methods: add, update, remove, list.

Save on quit, load on start. Wrap the file load in a try/except so a missing file on the first run doesn't crash the script — just start with an empty inventory instead.

Total value is a display concern. Calculate quantity × price at print time. No need to store it as an attribute, it'll always be derivable.

Going further

Once the core tool works:

• Low stock alerts. When displaying the list, flag any item whose quantity drops below a threshold you define.
• Search. Add a search command that finds items by name, with partial matching.
• Export report. Add an export command that writes a plain-text summary of current stock to a .txt file.