Every Tuesday morning I cut purchase orders. Two weeks ago the list wanted $41,000 across 38 SKUs. Payroll cleared Thursday. The balance on a Christmas container was due to the freight forwarder the same week. Realistically I had about $15,000 for stock.
So I picked. Everyone running a growing catalog does this. The reorder report hands you a list sized by stock math, and you cut it down by cash math it knows nothing about.
The stock math side is well documented. Demand, lead time, safety stock — we've covered that formula on this blog more than once. What nobody writes about is the other side: what to do with the 20 SKUs the formula says to buy and the bank account says to skip.
The constraint your inventory system doesn't model
A reorder point has three inputs, and none of them is your cash position. The formula assumes that when a SKU trips its trigger, a PO goes out. In practice, POs go out when the trigger trips and the money is there. For a few months a year those two conditions line up. For the rest, the operator arbitrates.
At 50 SKUs you can do that arbitration in your head. At 800 SKUs it fails, and it fails in a specific, predictable way.
The mental ledger, and how it kills you
Skip a SKU this week and next week it's still flagged. Now it sits in the list alongside the new flags, and you face a choice: re-litigate the same decision every week, or start skimming past it.
Everyone starts skimming. That's the failure. A skip you made deliberately in July (good reasons, tight week, plenty of stock runway) becomes part of the visual noise by August. By September the SKU is out of stock and you're staring at the flag you trained yourself to ignore, trying to remember whether you ever actually decided anything.
The skip itself was reasonable. But it lived in your head instead of in the system, with no date attached and no cost calculated.
Rule one: a deferral gets a date
Never skip a SKU silently. If you're not buying it this week, park it explicitly: out of the active list, with a review date and a one-line reason. "Cash. Revisit August 1." "Supplier shut for two weeks." "Waiting on the new price list."
This does two things. The list you read every Tuesday now contains only live decisions, which means you actually read it. And when the parked SKU resurfaces on its date, it arrives as a fresh decision with its context attached instead of stale noise you've been stepping over for six weeks.
We run about 800 tracked SKUs at Personalised Favours, and in a tight month I'll have 25 to 30 parked at once. Before we had a proper mechanism for this, those 30 lived in a note on my phone. The note was wrong within two weeks, every time.
Rule two: price the deferral before you make it
Not all skips are equal, and a little math turns "which ones do I skip" from vibes into a ranked list.
For each SKU the formula says to buy, work out how long until it actually hits its reorder point, then subtract the lead time:
Deferral headroom = days until the SKU trips its reorder point − lead time in calendar days
Two examples from my own floor.
Candle jars: on hand 900 units, reorder point 420 units, selling about 8.6 units/day. That's (900 − 420) ÷ 8.6 ≈ 56 days until the trigger trips. Lead time from the supplier is 21 calendar days. Headroom: 35 days. I can park this for a month and lose nothing.
Satin ribbon, 10 mm: 15 days from tripping, and the mill quotes 20 business days — call it 28 calendar days door to door. Headroom: minus 13 days. Deferring this one isn't a cash decision anymore; it's a stockout decision. If I skip it, I'm choosing roughly two weeks of zero stock, and I can price that choice: 13 days × daily demand × margin per unit. Sometimes you make that call anyway. Fine. But make it with the number in front of you.
Sort your list by headroom and the tight week mostly solves itself. The $15,000 goes to negative-headroom SKUs first. Anything with 30+ days of headroom gets a park and a date. The SKUs in between get the actual thinking.
One wrinkle: "days until it trips" is a forecast, and a trailing average will lie to you on seasonal SKUs. In June, a flat average tells an Australian gift business its Christmas SKUs have months of headroom. They don't. Use the demand you expect over the coming weeks, or at least sanity-check the seasonal lines by hand.
Rule three: when you do buy, look at the whole supplier
Freight and handling are charged per PO, not per unit. So before you cut this week's orders, check what else is coming due from the same supplier in the next few weeks.
Sometimes pulling an item forward is wrong: it's spending cash sooner, which is the exact thing you're managing against. But run the freight number first. A $180 freight charge on a $600 top-up order is 30 percent of the order value. Pay that twice in a month because you ordered from the same supplier in two installments, and your careful deferral saved you nothing.
There's no universal answer here. Make the call while looking at the full supplier picture, not one flagged line at a time.
Where the tooling fits
I'll declare the interest: my company is Stocura's founding customer and we run production purchasing on it daily. The three rules above map to things I now get without spreadsheets. Parked SKUs resurface on their snooze date instead of living in my phone. Each SKU's page shows a projected date for when it next hits its reorder point, so ranking deferrals takes seconds rather than a spreadsheet session. And when I place an order, the ordering screen surfaces everything else due from that supplier before I commit the PO.
None of it is exotic. All of it used to be manual, and the manual version is what failed me at 800 SKUs. If you're on Cin7 Core with a spreadsheet, you can still run the whole method by hand — the math is four columns.
This week
Get the skips out of your head. Write down every SKU you're deliberately not buying right now, each with a review date and a reason. Then compute headroom for the lot: days until reorder point, minus lead time. Anything negative, either buy it or write down what the stockout will cost, so the skip is a decision instead of an accident. And before Tuesday's POs go out, group the list by supplier and check the freight math on anything you're about to order twice.
Cash constraints never show up in the reorder formula, but they show up in the bank feed every week. This is how I keep them from turning into stockouts. It costs ten minutes on a Tuesday and the discipline to never skip a SKU without writing it down.
Tired of carrying the skipped list in your head?
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