Plan an entire supplier order across multiple SKUs. Account for sales velocity, lead time, safety stock, inbound units, MOQs, case packs, unit cost, profit, and a limited purchasing budget.
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| SKU | On hand | Inbound | Daily sales | Lead days | Safety days | MOQ | Case pack | Unit cost | Profit/unit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A red "Today" bar ends before its lead time — that SKU will stock out before a new order can arrive, which is why it's funded first. Unfunded lines show no improvement in the green bar.
Order 312 units · $1,560.00 · 30.0 days of supply
A single-SKU reorder formula assumes unlimited cash and ignores supplier constraints. A real purchase order competes for a finite budget, must respect MOQs and case packs, and needs to protect the products most likely to stock out.
This planner calculates target stock through lead time plus safety stock, subtracts available and inbound inventory, rounds to order constraints, and funds the most urgent items first.
Lead time should cover production, inspection, freight, customs, prep, appointment delays, and receiving—not just factory production. Safety stock absorbs demand and timing uncertainty.
Use a longer buffer for volatile sales or unreliable supply, but remember that excess inventory ties up cash and can create storage costs.
The funded flag is a planning aid, not a final purchasing decision. Review contribution profit, seasonality, supplier relationships, expiration risk, and strategic importance. A low-margin SKU close to stockout may deserve less cash than a highly profitable SKU with slightly more cover.
Download the plan, validate quantities with the supplier, and rerun it when sales velocity or inbound timing changes.
Every quantity this planner produces comes from one transparent calculation. Using the default example SKU — 10 units/day, 45-day lead time, 14 days of safety stock, 300 on hand, none inbound, 24-unit case packs, 100 MOQ:
| Step | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Target stock through the risk window | 10 units/day × (45 + 14) days | 590 units |
| 2. Subtract what you already have | 590 − 300 on hand − 0 inbound | 290 units needed |
| 3. Round up to full case packs | ceil(290 ÷ 24) = 13 cases × 24 | 312 units |
| 4. Check the MOQ | 312 ≥ 100 minimum | order stands at 312 |
| 5. Cost the line | 312 × $5.00 unit cost | $1,560 against the budget |
The urgency sort then answers the question a spreadsheet can't: which lines get funded first when the budget can't cover everything? Urgency is days of current stock minus lead time — a SKU whose stock runs out before a new order could arrive sits at the top, because no amount of money spent later un-loses those sales.
The most common planning failure is entering the factory's quoted production time as the whole lead time. For a typical China-to-US FBA replenishment, the full chain looks like this:
| Stage | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Production | 15–45 days | Longer after Chinese New Year and in Q4; confirm against your last three POs, not the supplier's quote |
| Pre-shipment inspection | 1–3 days | Plus rework time if the inspection fails — budget for the failure case on new suppliers |
| Ocean freight (port to port) | 18–35 days | West Coast is faster; East Coast and rail inland add 1–2 weeks. Air freight compresses this to 5–12 days at 4–6× the cost |
| Customs clearance | 1–5 days | Exams are rare but add 1–2 weeks when they happen |
| Drayage / trucking to Amazon or 3PL | 2–7 days | Longer if routing through a prep center |
| Amazon receiving & check-in | 2–14 days | The most underestimated stage — units are not sellable until checked in, and peak-season receiving slows dramatically |
Summed, a "30-day" production quote is realistically a 45–90 day sellable-inventory lead time. Use your recent worst case, not your best, and remember safety stock exists to absorb the variance you can't schedule.
MOQ and case-pack rounding quietly reshape a purchase order. Rounding 290 units up to 312 added $110 of cost in the example above — trivial. But when a slow SKU needs 40 units and the MOQ is 500, the "order" becomes 460 units of excess: over a year of extra cover, storage fees, and tied-up cash. When you see a recommended quantity far above the calculated need, that's the MOQ talking, and the real decision is whether to negotiate the MOQ down, accept the working-capital hit, or delay the reorder until the need approaches the minimum.
Practical levers: suppliers frequently halve an MOQ for a modest unit-price increase (often worth it — compare the price bump against 12 months of storage on the excess); consolidating colors or sizes into one production run can satisfy a factory's true constraint, which is usually the production changeover rather than your specific SKU count; and case-pack sizes are often negotiable at PO time even when the listing already exists.
Demand through lead time plus safety-stock days, minus current and inbound inventory, rounded to MOQ and case-pack constraints.
Enter a seasonally adjusted daily sales rate. Historical averages alone may understate peak demand.
After higher-urgency items are allocated, the remaining budget cannot cover that item's rounded order cost.
A common starting point is 10–20 days for stable SKUs with reliable suppliers, and 20–40 days for volatile demand, long ocean lead times, or single-source suppliers. The right number balances the margin lost to a stockout against storage fees and tied-up cash on the buffer.
Replace the daily-sales input with your expected peak-season rate, not the trailing average — last year's same-period velocity times your growth rate is a reasonable base. Also lengthen lead time: production, freight, and Amazon check-in all slow down in the months before Q4.
Urgency-first is the safest default because stockout sales are unrecoverable, but override it when a low-margin SKU crowds out a high-profit one, when a supplier relationship depends on an order, or when an urgent SKU is being discontinued anyway. The funded flag is a starting point, not a rule.
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