How do I set up purchase order reordering?

Purchasing is one of the most critical and challenging tasks in any retail organization. You want to make customers happy by stocking the products that match their demand while meeting your company’s financial targets.

There are two big questions a purchasing department faces at any given moment:

• When should you reorder more inventory?
• How many units should you order?

If you over-purchase, then you’ll have inventory taking up real estate in your warehouse and tying precious dollars that could be have reinvested elsewhere.  If you purchase too little, then you’ll miss sales opportunities by stocking out and frustrating customers in the process

Recognizing this persistent struggle for purchasing, Finale has an advanced reordering capability to assist by notifying when to create a purchase order and recommend how many units to purchase.

Learn how one of our customers, Lox Extensions, was able to reduce their reordering process from a several hours to a few seconds with the Finale reordering capability.

As a high level, there are three basics steps required to set-up the reordering process. 

1) Setup Reordering Rules

The first step is set-up rules when to reorder more stock for your product. 

Before setting the reorder rules, if you have more than one warehouse location, you first need to decide if you are going to create one purchase order for the warehouses and create separate purchase orders, one for each warehouse location.

There are two methods currently available:

A.  Min / Max Inventory Ordering Method: 

This is the simplest method of inventory control reordering and is easy to set-up with Finale with two static inputs. The “Min” value represents a stock level that triggers a reorder and the “Max” value represents a new targeted stock level following the reorder.

This reordering method is ideal there product sales are predictable and for customer who want a simple configuration to assist with reordering.

  Information how to set-up this reordering inventory method can be found here:

B. [ADVANCED]  Inventory ReOrdering Based on Sales Velocity (Historical Sales)

Finale will set dynamic reorder points based on the sales velocity and user defined fields (supplier lead time, desired safety stock, and expected sales growth) —to make smarter, faster purchasing decisions.

This is ideal for customers who have product sales that are more unpredictable based on seasonality, new product launch, or other factors and want something more powerful and dynamic than static min / max thresholds to assist them with reordering.

  Information how to set-up this reordering inventory method can be found here: 

2) Setup Notifications

Once the reorder rules are set, the next step is set-up notifications so you do not need to be logged in when to know when it's time to reorder.  Finale can be figured to send you to emails at different frequencies.

Information how to configure notifications can be found here.

3) Create the Reorder

Once the reorder rules and notifications are set, you will quickly be able create purchase orders from the 'Reorder' section.   

The reorder section will display every product that needs be ordered aggregated by supplier.  As a result, you will quickly create a PO for 'CompanyA' with a single mouse click.  

If you have products that need to reordered, you will be able to quickly have purchase order groups by supplier.