Inventory planning is mostly a handful of numbers and the judgement about when to trust them. These are the ones that come up. Every formula here is checked against the code that runs in Proviand, and every page has a section saying who should not buy it.
The long ones. How a piece of inventory work actually gets done, start to finish.
The seven inputs behind a reorder number, in plain language, and how to sanity-check a forecast you do not trust.
Draft, send, track as incoming, receive. Including the incoming-stock trap that makes people order the same thing twice.
What Shopify now does natively with purchase orders and receiving, who that is genuinely enough for, and exactly where it stops.
What to export before you lose access, and how to land your open purchase orders somewhere sensible.
One number per page, worked with real arithmetic, checked against the code that runs it.
Average daily sales times lead time, plus safety stock. The formula is the easy part; the two inputs are where the money goes.
A practical version you can compute today, the statistical one you were taught, and the assumption inside it that small stores usually break.
Turning a stock level into a date. Plus the only comparison that matters: cover against lead time.
Order-to-shelf, not what the supplier quoted. How to measure the real number, and why its variability matters more than its average.
Sorting the catalogue takes five minutes. What you do differently with each class is the part that saves money.
Telling dead from slow from seasonal, what it really costs you, and how to decide between discounting, bundling, returning and writing off.
Written to be useful if you end up choosing the other one.
More on the way: comparisons against Inventory Planner, Sensible, Prediko and Fabrikator. If there is a number you keep having to work out by hand, email [email protected] and I will write it up.
