Stop 7 of 8 · Weekly
Inventory and reorders
Inventory plus sixty days of sales gives weeks of cover, the supplier PDF gives lead times, and your own costs give the cash line.
What the inventory export cannot tell you
Units on hand is a number that looks like an answer and is not one. Forty crews on the shelf is comfortable if you sell three a week and an emergency if you sell twelve. What Omar needs is weeks of cover, and cover only means something next to a lead time.
Three inputs make the table. The inventory export gives units on hand per variant. Sixty days of orders gives the weekly rate per variant, which is the only honest way to work out cover. The supplier PDF gives lead times, which nobody remembers and everybody guesses.
Per size, always
A handle-level reorder table is how a store ends up with forty extra smalls. Sales are lumpy by size and returns are lumpier still, and the trouser that returns at twenty percent in a 30 inseam is not short of stock, it is short of a size chart fix from stop 5. Build the table per variant and read it per size.
Lead times, with a page number
Supplier lead times live in PDFs and email threads: eight weeks for knitwear, four for tees, twelve if the mill is on holiday. Upload the PDF and ask for the lead time with the page it came from. The page number is the whole trick, because it turns a claim you have to trust into a claim you can check while the chat is still open.
The cash line
The reorder table becomes a cheque, and the cheque comes from Omar's costs. Not an estimate, not an average garment cost, not a figure worked backwards from retail. He pastes handle and cost per unit for the flagged rows, the arithmetic gets done, and every row he did not supply a cost for comes back blank with a count of the blanks. Freight and duty are the same rule: his numbers or nothing.
Try this
[upload the inventory export, the last 60 days of orders with the customer columns deleted, and the supplier PDF] Build one reorder table by variant: handle, size, units on hand, units sold in 60 days, weekly rate, weeks of cover, lead time in weeks taken from the supplier PDF with the page number you found it on, and reorder units for eight weeks of cover after the lead time. Flag every row where weeks of cover is below lead time plus two. If a lead time is not in the PDF, leave it blank and list those handles separately rather than assuming one.
My costs per unit for the flagged rows, handle then cost: [paste the list] Add a cost column and a line total to the reorder table, then total the cash this order needs, split by supplier. Leave the cost and total blank for any row I did not give you a cost for, and tell me how many rows are blank. Do not estimate a cost, a freight charge or a duty rate for any reason.
From the same table give me three versions of this order: everything flagged, only the rows that stock out before their lead time, and the smallest order that keeps my top ten sellers in stock for eight weeks. Give me the cash total of each using only the costs I gave you, and tell me what the smallest version risks.