Skip to main content
Reorder materials answers what to buy, from what your batches have committed and what your sales will need. Open it from the Raw materials hub. A material appears when its free stock falls below its safety stock plus what it is about to need.

​
The columns

  • Free - what is on the shelf, plus what is on order and being made, less what open batches have committed. On hand alone reads as comfortable while every metre of it is spoken for.
  • On order - units on a purchase order that has not been received.
  • Needed - what will be consumed over this material’s own lead time plus restock window. It is your finished-goods sales forecast, walked back through your bills of materials and netted against the finished stock you already hold.
  • Order - enough to clear the shortfall and put the buffer back, rounded up to the supplier’s pack size and minimum order.
The horizon is per material, shown under the Needed figure. A material with a 14-day lead time is asked about over a different window from one with two days.

​
Where Needed comes from

Three things reduce it, in order:
  1. Finished goods you already hold. Five hundred cookies on the shelf against three hundred forecast sales needs no flour.
  2. Batches already underway. Their output is coming, and their material is already in Committed, so counting both would deduct the same flour twice.
  3. Intermediate stock. Dough you hold is dough you do not have to make, so the flour under it is not asked for either.
If nothing you sell has a bill of materials, or a product has no sales history yet, Needed reads as a dash. Nothing is forecasting that material, so the page falls back to what your batches have committed.

​
Buying

Select rows and Create purchase order. Stockful previews exactly what it will raise - one draft per supplier and destination, with quantities rounded to their terms and the cost - before anything exists. The destination is the location that needs it: where the batch consuming it is running, or failing that where the material is stocked. A purchase order has one destination, so materials for two locations become two orders. Materials also go on purchase orders you raise by hand. Open one and use Add raw materials beside the product search.

​
Receiving

Receiving a material works the same way from your side, but not underneath. A material has no Shopify inventory item, so its half of a receipt never reaches Shopify; it lands in Stockful’s ledger instead. An order holding both products and materials is received in one action, with only the product half going to Shopify.

​
Materials you make

A material with a bill of materials of its own shows Made here and a Start a batch action instead of a purchase order, because there is nobody to send an order to. It still appears when it is short - it is still something you need to act on, just not by buying it.