Low-stock alerts with a threshold per product, not one number for everything

The threshold lives on the product

Each product carries its own low-stock threshold. That single design decision is what makes the alert list usable, because the right trigger level is a property of the product's demand and lead time, not of your business as a whole.

A fast line with a two-day lead time might need a threshold of 60. A slow spare with a six-week lead time might need a threshold of 2. Both are correct, and no global number can express both.

Scroll the diagram sideways →

A live list, not an email you will ignore

The Low Stock screen is a live view of everything currently under its own threshold, ordered so the most urgent sits at the top. It is a working screen, not a notification: you open it as part of the ordering routine, filter it by category or vendor, and act on it.

Out-of-stock lines are called out separately from merely low ones, because they are a different problem with a different urgency. A line at zero is losing sales right now; a line under threshold is a purchasing task for today.

Reorder suggests a quantity, not just a flag

Knowing you are low is half the job. The Reorder screen goes further and proposes how much to order, reading the product's actual movement history rather than a fixed rule. That means the suggestion reflects what has really been selling in recent weeks — including the fact that it slowed down, which is exactly the case where a fixed reorder quantity buys you dead stock.

You are never locked into the suggestion. It is a starting number in an editable field, and the purchase order it feeds into is an ordinary PO you can adjust before sending.

Forecast: when does this run out?

The Stock Forecast screen answers the question a threshold cannot: not "am I low", but "how many days do I have". It projects a run-out date per product from the current position and recent consumption rate. That is the number that tells you whether a six-week lead time is already too late.

Dated stock has a second clock

If you handle pharmacy, food, cosmetics or anything else with a shelf life, quantity is only half the risk. Batch tracking carries a lot number and expiry date through every movement, and Expiry Alerts warn you before dated stock crosses the line into a write-off — early enough to discount it, return it to the supplier, or move it to a location that will sell it.

Setting thresholds without doing it 2,000 times

Nobody is going to hand-set a threshold on a catalogue of two thousand products, and a system that requires it will simply be left at its defaults. Two things make it tractable:

• Bulk edit — select a filtered set of products and change the threshold on all of them at once.
• Update from Excel — export the catalogue, calculate thresholds in a column of formulas, and re-import matching on SKU. For a first pass this is by far the fastest route: work out reorder points for your A-class items properly and give everything else a sensible default.

ABC analysis is the natural companion here — spend the effort on the fifth of the catalogue that carries most of the value, and default the rest.