Do you know a good plain text warehouse inventory tool?

As much as I'm looking forward to leverage Matthias Beyer's imag libraries (text based personal information management suite) to connect my tools, I have yet to find a simple way to keep track of inventory and customer orders in plain text. At first sight, and with some imagination, this may be like a ledger, but the goods may have many properties, like an expiration date, online refs, etc ...

Warehousing and order management are typically done in bulky GUI applications. I like to know what people do to run a small business as much as possible in plain text (and without a graphical environment) in that regard. Any advice?