Excel templates · Online shops
Reorder Quantity & Stock Cover Template (Excel) — Free
One row per SKU: stock on hand, daily sales, lead time and safety buffer in — cover, reorder point, order quantity and the cash it ties up out. It answers the two questions a restock always comes down to: when, and how much.
The download
Free download
Download: Reorder point & stock cover
- Stock cover in days per SKU
- Reorder point from lead time plus safety buffer
- Days left before you have to place the order
- Order quantity and the cash it ties up
No email, no sign-up. Formulas already wired up.
The sheet itself
- Stock cover in days per SKU
- Reorder point from lead time plus safety buffer
- Days left before you have to place the order
- Order quantity and the cash it ties up
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Reorder point & stock cover | |||||||||||||
| 2 | Fill in the blue cells — every other cell is a formula and works itself out. foreqast.app | |||||||||||||
| 3 | SKU A | SKU B | SKU C | SKU D | SKU E | SKU F | ||||||||
| 4 | ||||||||||||||
| 5 | 820 | 140 | 1,960 | 75 | 2,400 | 310 | ||||||||
| 6 | 14.0 | 6.0 | 32.0 | 2.2 | 46.0 | 10.5 | ||||||||
| 7 | 45 d | 60 d | 30 d | 90 d | 21 d | 45 d | ||||||||
| 8 | 14 d | 14 d | 14 d | 14 d | 14 d | 14 d | ||||||||
| 9 | ||||||||||||||
| 10 | 59 d | 23 d | 61 d | 34 d | 52 d | 30 d | ||||||||
| 11 | 826 | 444 | 1,408 | 229 | 1,610 | 620 | ||||||||
| 12 | 0 d | -51 d | 17 d | -70 d | 17 d | -29 d | ||||||||
| 13 | ||||||||||||||
| 14 | 90 d | 90 d | 90 d | 90 d | 90 d | 90 d | ||||||||
| 15 | 1,070 | 760 | 1,880 | 321 | 2,706 | 1,108 | ||||||||
| 16 | €31.00 | €54.00 | €18.00 | €88.00 | €12.00 | €37.00 | ||||||||
| 17 | €33,170 | €41,040 | €33,840 | €28,248 | €32,472 | €40,996 | ||||||||
The blue cells are yours to fill in. Every other cell is a formula and works itself out.
How to use it
- 1
Take daily sales from the last 30 days, not the last 12 months
A yearly average flattens exactly the trend you are ordering against. Use a recent window, and for a seasonal SKU use the same window last year.
- 2
Set the lead time honestly
Lead time is from placing the order to sellable stock in your warehouse: production, freight, customs and inbound handling. Not what the supplier quotes for production alone.
- 3
Read “days until you must order”
Negative means you are already late — every day from here is a day of lost sales at the end of the cover. Zero means order today.
- 4
Check the order value against your bank balance
The last row is the real decision. An order that is right for the warehouse and wrong for the account is still wrong — so read it next to your cash plan.
A worked example
Four SKUs, one of them already too late
- SKU B — stock cover
- 23 days
- SKU B — lead time + buffer
- 74 days
- SKU B — days until you must order
- −51 days
- SKU B — order quantity
- 760
- SKU B — cash tied up
- €41,040
SKU B has 23 days of stock and a 60-day lead time. It should have been ordered seven weeks ago; whatever you do now, there will be about 51 days with nothing to sell. And the order that fixes it costs €41,000 — more than any of the other three, for the SKU that sells the least.
The mistakes that break it
Ordering by gut feel from the warehouse
“The shelf looks empty” is a signal about today. The reorder point is a signal about the day the stock actually runs out, which is lead time away.
Leaving the safety buffer at zero
Without a buffer, every supplier delay and every good sales week becomes a stockout. Two weeks is a reasonable default, more for overseas freight.
Ignoring what the order does to cash
Suppliers are usually paid weeks before the goods sell. Four “correct” orders in the same month is how a profitable shop runs out of money.
Where the template stops
It plans one order, not a year of them
The sheet is a snapshot of today's stock. It cannot show you the four restocks that follow, or that three of them fall in the same quarter as your tax payment.
12-month cash-flow planDaily sales are a number you maintain by hand
Every SKU needs re-exporting from the shop every few weeks. With more than a couple of dozen SKUs that stops happening, and the sheet quietly goes stale.
A month is an average, and cash is not
A month that ends positive can still go below zero on the 14th, when payroll leaves before the biggest invoice arrives. Column totals hide exactly that.
What comes after the spreadsheet
Plan a restockThe sheet says what to order. The forecast says what it does to your bank balance on the day the invoice lands.Calculators