Inventory Reorder Point Template
Reorder points computed from your own velocity and each supplier's delivered lead time, triggered on inventory position rather than on the shelf count.
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Reorder Points
[Company] — [n] SKUs, [n] suppliers, computed [date]
Lead time comes from your own receipts, not from the quote. A row with no receipt count has a mean and no spread, and with no spread there is no safety stock to compute.
| SKU | Supplier | Units a day | Daily spread | Lead mean | Lead spread | Receipts | Cycle stock | Safety stock | Reorder point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
The trigger is a position, and it takes three columns rather than one
| On hand | What a shelf count returns. Includes units sold and not yet picked, so it reads high |
| On order | Placed and not yet received. Not on the shelf but already bought, so leaving it out buys it twice |
| Allocated | Committed to orders that have not shipped. Physically present, and not available to sell |
| Position | On hand, plus on order, less allocated. This is the number that goes against the reorder point |
Safety stock is z times the square root of the mean lead time times the daily demand variance, plus mean daily demand squared times the lead time variance. Both terms, because both things vary, and on a small catalogue the second is usually the larger.
Every reorder point template compares its trigger against the shelf count, and the shelf count includes units that are already sold. Shopify's own inventory model says so plainly: on-hand is the sum of available, committed, reserved, damaged, safety stock and quality control, and committed means a placed order nobody has picked yet. So the trigger in this pack runs against inventory position, on hand plus on order less allocated, and safety stock is computed from each supplier's delivered lead times rather than typed into a box.
Bracken and Loom is an invented home goods seller with twelve SKUs and three suppliers. Its old rule held two weeks of cover on everything. That over-buffered six SKUs by $3,563 of stock, which is $855 a year to carry, and under-buffered five. All five of those sit on the one supplier whose deliveries run thirty-four days on average with a nine day spread, and one stockout on each of the five is $55,275 of gross margin. Sorting that table by the error sorts it by supplier, which nobody asked it to do.
Run the same twelve SKUs against position and three change answer, in both directions. Two were about to be re-bought with purchase orders already in transit, $7,470 at cost, the kind of duplicate a paid but not shipped reconciliation also catches from the order side. The third read healthy at 210 units against a point of 209, until eighteen units allocated to open orders put its position at 192. One column, both errors.
What's in the pack
Reorder Points sheet
One row per SKU carrying the supplier's mean lead time, its spread, and how many receipts are behind both, so the safety stock column has a derivation rather than a guess.
Velocity by SKU sheet
Units a day with the daily spread beside it, and a note on any SKU whose season means the comparable window is the same months last year rather than the last thirty days. Demand hidden inside bundles has to be pushed down onto the components before this column is right.
Purchase Plan sheet
On hand, on order and allocated in three columns, then the trigger read both ways, so a SKU that only looks healthy sits next to one that only looks short.
Overstock Register sheet
The slow movers holding $9,648 at cost, each with the supplier minimum that put it there. How far to discount is a margin by channel question.
Reorder Policy
Five clauses: the position trigger, the safety stock formula, a 95 percent service level with two written exceptions, the order quantity rule, and which events, including a confirmed defect pattern on the next shipment, force a recompute.
Supplier Note
Each supplier's delivered lead time distribution, priced, so requalifying it is a true-cost decision, not a lead-time-only one.
Minimum Order Quantity Note
What to do with stock that arrived because a minimum beat the need. Check whether the listing is the problem before you price it down.
How the Reorder Points Were Computed
The whole worked catalogue: the variance split per SKU, the service level priced at three settings, and the stockout exposure that decides whether a buffer is worth carrying.
Reorder alert
A weekly pass reporting which SKUs crossed their point on position, which receipts landed outside a supplier's usual range, and which velocities moved far enough to move a point.
How it works
- 1
Open it or download it
Open the pack in River with the agent already primed, or take the blank Word documents and CSV sheets away for free with no account.
- 2
Send two exports
Sales history by SKU, and purchase order history with order and receipt dates. Units sold rather than units paid out, so an order export beats a settlement report.
- 3
Read the variance split
Every SKU shows how much of its buffer absorbs your customers and how much absorbs your supplier, before a single reorder point gets set.
- 4
Work the weekly plan
The purchase plan triggers on position, and the alert reports crossings, odd receipts and velocity moves without anybody running a Monday review.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. Four sheets, four documents and the policy download with no signup and no card, and they are the same files the agent works in. Editing with AI is the optional path, where your own exports become the velocity spread and each supplier's lead time distribution.
What format are the downloaded files?
CSV (.csv) for Velocity by SKU, Reorder Points, the Purchase Plan and the Overstock Register, and Word (.docx) for the policy and the three notes, zipped together. Nothing needs converting: Excel, Numbers, Sheets, Word, Pages and Google Docs all open them directly.
What does Edit with AI actually do?
It installs the pack as a private Space and asks for your sales and purchase order exports. From those it builds a daily demand spread per SKU, a lead time distribution per supplier, and a reorder point you can trace back to the receipts it came from.
Why trigger on inventory position instead of on-hand?
On-hand is wrong in two directions at once. It ignores stock already in transit, so you re-buy what is coming, and it counts units committed to unfulfilled orders as sellable, so a SKU already below its point reads healthy. Netting both is one column, and here it caught $7,470.
Do I need standard deviations to use this?
No, and you do not have to compute them. Both spreads fall out of exports you already have: daily demand from sales history, lead time from order dates against receipt dates. On this catalogue the supplier term was 71 to 97 percent of the variance on eleven of twelve SKUs.
Does this forecast demand?
No, deliberately. Velocity is measured from history rather than projected, because a wrong forecast and a wrong reorder point fail in the same place and afterwards nobody can tell which one did it. Where a SKU only spikes for a fixed promotional window, a seasonal stock plan fits better than a continuous trigger.
What happens when a SKU does run out?
The 95th percentile lead time is how long the outage lasts, which is why the policy lifts the service level past forty days of it. An online seller also needs a reasonable basis to believe it can ship, or has to offer a revised date or a prompt refund.
Find out which SKUs your buffer rule is quietly under-stocking
Download the blank pack as Word and CSV files, or open it in River and get a reorder point per SKU with your supplier's own delivery history behind every one of them.
Edit with AI