The Order By Sales feature allows you to create orders based on sales of stock items.
For a comparison between re-ordering methods, click HERE.
Before Using the Order By Sales Utility
- Stock-on-hand quantities need to be accurate to take full advantage of the utility. The following practices should be taken into account:
- Stock items are sold by their respective barcodes. Department sales will cause inaccurate stock quantities.
- All stock items are arrived through Retailer.
- A stocktake has been performed recently.
- Suppliers are set up with your correct account details. You can check your supplier settings through Stock Maintenance -> Suppliers and Departments.
Order By Sales Options
We have a video guide on creating supplier orders using the Order by Sales utility in Retailer - 🎬 Stock Reordering - Order by Sales
- On the top menu bar of Retailer, click on Stock Maintenance -> Orders -> Order By Sales.
- In the Consider Stock items Belonging To The Following Criteria section:
- Select All Departments or Selected Department and choose a department from the drop-down box.
- Select All Categories or a Selected Category and choose a category from the drop-down box.
- Select All Suppliers or a Selected Supplier and choose a supplier from the drop-down box.
- Select Custom List, then click Select Items. This will open the stock manager, where you can then create a custom list of stock that you wish to reorder. When your list is created, click OK. You can also use this method by first opening the stock manager, creating a list, then clicking Send List To and choosing Order by Sales. For more on the stock manager, click HERE.
- In the Consider Stock Sold During This Period section, enter the Start Date and End Date of sales to check.
- In the Consider Stock Arrived On Or After This Date, enter the Date Last Arrived. This ensures dead stock is not reordered.
- Tick Calculate YTD Sales Figures if you want to display the total quantity sold and total profit for year to date for each item listed in the Order by Sales screen.
- Tick Exclude Home Delivery & Subagent Orders if you only want to create an order based on retail sales
- Tick Exclude Special Customer Order Sales if you want to disregard special customer order sales.
- Tick Include Growth / Decline Factor, and enter a percentage to adjust the quantity to order based on a percentage (which could be seasonal changes).
- Tick Exclude Inactive Stock to exclude stock that has been marked as inactive.
- Tick Include Unsold Items if you want stock that was not sold during the chosen period to be listed in the order by sales grid anyway.
- Tick Show Monthly Breakdown to include a sales breakdown by month in the order by sales grid.
- Tick Combine Instore & External Sales to include your webstore sales in your total sales.
- Click on Process.
Stock lines may appear in orange highlight, to indicate that the item was sold in website sales, as opposed to in-store sales.
Creating Orders By Sales
Once the processing has completed you are presented with the Order by Sales Grid, containing all the information needed to make an informed decision for reordering. There are a few different methods of entering the order quantities of stock to be ordered. The most straight-forward way is to manually enter how many of each item to order into the Qty To Order column of the grid for each item. This process can be automated in the following ways:
Order by Sales: This method will copy the number in the Qty Sold column to the Qty to Order column. However many of each item was sold during the date range you provided earlier; that is how many will be ordered. To do this, click the Use Qty button, then tick Quantity Sold and click OK. These numbers can then be manually changed as needed before creating the order.
Desired QOH Level: This method uses your current quantity on hand and compares it to the desired quantity on hand to determine how many of each item to order. For more on how this works, click HERE. To do this, click the Use Qty button, then tick whichever of the 4 Desired QOH Level... options you wish, then click OK. These numbers can then be manually changed as needed before creating the order.
You must have set up desired quantity levels for all your stock to use this method effectively. Click HERE to learn more.
Forecast Order: New to Retailer 3.3.3, this method works out how many of each item you sold per week during the date range provided earlier, then calculates how many to order for the coming weeks based on this rate of sales and your current quantity on hand. To do this, first you must set how many weeks you will be forecasting ahead by changing the Forecast Order setting at the bottom of the page. Once this is done, click the Use Qty button, then tick Forecast Order and click OK. These numbers can then be manually changed as needed before creating the order.
An example of Forecast Ordering: You run Order by Sales for a date range of the last 10 weeks. During that time, you sold 20 of Item A - a rate of 2 per week. Item A currently has a QOH of 4. In the order by sales screen, you set the Forecast Order setting to 5 weeks, then hit Use Qty->Forecast Order. The system will calculate that you should order 6 more of Item A - you will need 10 to cover the next 5 weeks of sales, but already have 4 in stock, so need to order 6 more.Once you have filled in the Qty to Order column with one of the above methods, you can then proceed to create orders for that stock:
Click Totals to view a breakdown of the total amounts entered to be ordered by supplier and department.
Click Print to produce a printable report listing all stock to be ordered.
To place an order for the stock selected:
- Click on Create Pending Order.
- Click Yes to confirm creating a pending order.
- Click Yes to create a new pending order or click No to add the items to an existing pending order for the same supplier.
- If any stock does not have a supplier listed, you will be prompted to select one.
- The next screen displays a summary of the created pending orders. Click OK.
- The Orders Maintenance screen will then appear so that the order can be edited and/or sent to the supplier.
Click HERE for more information about managing orders.
Click HERE for more information about sending the order to the supplier.