Replenishment

The inventory review routine for a store that imports

Warehouse checklists are about bins and cycle counts. The buying side has a routine of its own, and each check runs on the clock of the thing it watches.

Marcus VolstedCo-founder, Restocio Published 27 October 20266 min read

Review purchasing on the clock of whatever can go wrong. Check order deadlines and arrived deliveries every working day, late orders and new products every week, the count on every delivery as it lands, cost prices, slow stock and near misses once a month, and how far your sales rates missed once a quarter. One weekly review is too slow for the first of those and too often for the last.

The checklists that come up for this question are mostly about the shelf, cycle counts of the best sellers and whether the sync is working. This one is about the buying, and it points each check at the page that covers it.

How often	What you check	Why on that clock	Where it sits in Restocio
Every working day	Deadlines that have arrived, deliveries that have landed, empty shelves	A missed sea deadline is paid for in faster freight	Dashboard (What to do today)
Every week	Orders past their date, products with only weeks of sales	A late order nobody answers is still counted as coming	The top of Incoming, under Purchase Orders, and the New product note on Replenishment's cards
Every delivery	The count against what was shipped	Records drift at the receiving door first	Incoming, under Purchase Orders
Every month	Cost prices, stock nobody is buying, deliveries that landed close to empty	They drift slowly and say nothing	SKU Manager (Costs & weight) and Replenishment (All, and the Incoming (PO) column)
Every quarter	How far the sales rate missed	A month holds too few orders to judge	Insights & Reports (Demand)

Every working day, a few minutes

An order deadline is a date, and the cheap freight option is gone the day after it. Miss a sea deadline and the gap gets covered by rail or air. So each morning, look for deadlines that have arrived or are close, deliveries waiting to be counted, and anything already empty.

In Restocio that is the What to do today panel on the Dashboard. Each line is a count linked to the screen that resolves it: products to order today, products due soon with the first deadline in so many days, deliveries to count in, late orders, units still missing from a delivery. There is no tick box. A line disappears once the thing behind it is done.

Every week, late orders and new products

Restocio asks about a late order from the day after its expected date plus that supplier's usual delay, on the Dashboard and at the top of Incoming, a tab on Purchase Orders with a red count while any wait for an answer. The weekly pass answers whatever nobody answered then. Until someone does, the plan keeps counting those units as coming: a late delivery on the route that leads your plan for a set number of days, a faster one until somebody marks it received or lost. Neither is as good as the real date. The question card there takes the new date, plans around it at once, and keeps the first date to learn how late that supplier usually runs.

New products belong in the same pass, because a few weeks of sales is a rate that still swings. Restocio measures it over the days the product has existed, and for a product under two weeks old the card's “How this was calculated” on Replenishment says “New product: only N days of history”: a pace that will swing, so check a big quantity by hand. Sizing that first reorder has its own page.

On every delivery, the count

Count each delivery the day it lands, against that delivery rather than the whole order, since one purchase order usually arrives in several parts. In Restocio that is Incoming, a tab on Purchase Orders, below the late orders. You type what arrived, anything missing stays open, and short deliveries collect in a list per supplier with a button that copies it for the email. Counting in updates the order and the plan. Whether it also raises the stock in Shopify depends on one switch on Settings, General, “Let Restocio update your Shopify store”, which starts off. Before launch, Restocio writes nothing to Shopify for any store, even with that switch on. Until it does, the Shopify number is still yours to check.

Every month, the numbers that drift quietly

Start with cost prices. A purchase price typed once goes stale at the next price rise or currency swing, and every margin figure reads from it. The ten-minute COGS check is the monthly version. The What to do today panel counts products missing a price, a weight or a supplier. A price that is there but out of date is yours to catch.

Next, the stock nobody is buying. On Replenishment, open All. The list runs soonest deadline first, so the products carrying the most cover sit at the far end, before anything already ordered, with Stock lasts beside each. Products hidden as slow sellers are named, with their stock, in the line above the list that says how many are not in it. Anything holding far more cover than you would ever order is cash that comes back slowly, and the dead stock page has the bands for what to do with it.

Last, the near misses. A delivery that landed with only a few days to spare worked, and it is also the plainest sign your safety days are thin. Checking the cushion that survived each landing is a monthly job. For deliveries still on the water, the Incoming (PO) column on Replenishment adds a red line, “Lands N days after you run out”, when one lands after the shelf is empty. One that only just makes it is not flagged.

Every quarter, the forecast

If you order 90 days at a time, each product gets about one new order a quarter, so checking monthly mostly rereads the same orders. Each quarter, set the rate each order was sized on against what sold while the goods travelled, as the forecast check sets out. The Demand tab under Insights & Reports scores the shop's forecast as a whole, not the per-product rate that sizes your orders, so the product-level check is yours.

What this routine leaves to you

Restocio brings the daily, weekly and delivery checks to you as they come up. The monthly and quarterly ones it does not, so put them in a calendar. Nor does it email you a deadline. Under Settings, Notifications, you choose which addresses get an email when a product runs out of stock or a delivery runs late, but the deadline lives on screen, so the daily check works only if somebody opens the app. Bin counts and the full stocktake belong to your warehouse's routine, or your 3PL's.

Common questions

How often should I review inventory on Shopify?

Match each check to how fast the thing it watches can go wrong. If you import, that means deadlines and arrived deliveries daily, late orders and new products weekly, the count on every delivery, cost prices and slow stock monthly, and forecast accuracy quarterly. One weekly review misses deadlines and rechecks numbers that barely moved.

What should a weekly inventory review include?

For a store that imports, two things: purchase orders past their expected date, so the plan stops counting units that are not coming, and products with only a few weeks of sales, whose rate still swings. Deadlines are too urgent to wait for it, and cost prices too slow to need it.

Do I still need a stock count if I count every delivery?

Counting at the receiving door catches the drift that starts there, which is where an importer's records drift first. Breakage, theft and picking mistakes come later, so a count of the shelf still has a place, on whatever schedule your warehouse keeps.

Marcus Volsted

Co-founder, Restocio

Marcus co-founded Restocio and works on it daily with a Swedish importer who plans their purchasing in it every working day. Restocio is built in Sweden by two founders, one Swedish and one Danish, and Marcus is the Danish one. Why we are building it.