Reorder alerts and anomalies

A stock-out usually builds over weeks, while the team is busy shipping and no one is watching the count. The reorder point is you deciding, once, where the line is for each product, so that the account can watch it every day and tell you weeks before the shelf is empty. The anomaly list catches the mistakes that do not show up as a falling count.

The reorder point

Take a face cream your supplier takes ten days to deliver and that sells about two a day. You want twenty on the shelf when you reorder, to bridge the lead time, so the reorder point is twenty. Open the product's detail drawer from the Inventory page, find the Reorder point field, type the number and save. At fifty units nothing happens. At nineteen an alert is raised: a red Reorder badge appears on the product's row, and an email arrives. You place the order with the supplier, and when the delivery lands and available stock climbs back above twenty, the alert clears itself.

Set a point on every product that matters, and on the ingredients of your kits rather than on the kit, because the alert has to fire on the thing you buy.

Open alerts

Open Reorder from the main menu and click the Alerts tab. There is one row per open alert, with the product, the location, the stock level when the alert fired and your reorder point, and the badge on the menu item tells you how many are waiting. Once the restock order is placed, click Resolve on the row and it leaves the active list. The alerts go by email too, so give operations a shared inbox that receives them rather than one person's.

Decide where the line is once. The account will tell you every time stock crosses it.

The anomaly list

Some errors do not look like a falling number, and the anomaly list looks for them. An impossible negative count, minus three of something, which usually means someone shipped against a delivery that was never recorded as received. A large gap between the account and your Shopify store on one product, which calls for an import and a check. The same item counted twice, because a product was mapped to two SKUs by accident and every sale double-deducts. And a sudden swing, a product that lost most of its stock in an hour with no matching orders.

Open the Anomalies view once a week. Each entry has a short description and a link to the product. Click through, find the cause, and either record an adjustment if the count was wrong or contact support if the movement has no explanation. A SKU double-counted for six months can mean weeks of stock-outs by the time anyone notices; the list is there so it is caught in the first week.

From alert to order

An alert still has to be turned into an order. The reorder workspace has a tab for suggestions, with a status and an urgency on each, and a tab for the policies behind each suggestion, so the step from "this is low" to "this is ordered from this supplier" is in the same place. Suppliers and purchase orders picks it up from there.