Fast movers get noticed because they are always moving. The dangerous item is the steady one — a few units a week, never dramatic, and one afternoon a customer asks for it and the shelf is empty. Nobody was careless. Nothing about that item ever demanded attention until it was already too late.
The question is not how much is left
A shelf count tells you a quantity. It does not tell you whether that quantity is a month of cover or three days of it. The same twenty units can be comfortable or urgent depending entirely on how fast they leave, and the count on its own cannot distinguish the two.
So the useful figure is time, not quantity
How many days of stock is left, given how it has actually been selling. That turns a shelf full of unrelated numbers into a single ordered list, and the top of that list is what you order today.
How BizGST Pro works it out
The Reorder Report reads the last ninety days of outward stock movement for every item with tracking switched on and converts it to a monthly run rate. Against that it shows what is on hand, the buffer you have set as the item's low-stock alert, the run rate itself, and how many days of stock that leaves. Items are sorted with the ones closest to running out first.
What it suggests ordering
Enough to cover next month's projected sales plus your buffer, less what is already on the shelf. Items where that comes out at zero or below, and that are above their alert level, drop off the list entirely — so the report is a short list of things to act on rather than a full inventory to read through.
Three things it does not know
- How long your supplier takes. The suggestion covers demand, not the gap between ordering and receiving — if a supplier takes weeks, order earlier than the list implies.
- That next month might not look like the last three. A flat average has no idea a season is coming, so read it against what you know about your own trade.
- Anything about an item you have only just started stocking. Ninety days of history is what makes the run rate meaningful, and a new item has none — it will read as no demand until it has sold for a while.
The setting that makes the difference
The buffer in the calculation is whatever low-stock alert you have set on the item. Leave it at zero and the suggestion covers only next month's projected sales with nothing spare, which for anything you cannot afford to be out of is too tight. Setting it once, item by item, is what turns the report from a rough guide into something you can order from.
Where it sits in the routine
This is a weekly ten-minute read, not a daily one. Demand does not move fast enough for a daily check to tell you anything new, and a report you open every day is a report you stop reading.