When Should You Restock? How to Compute Your Reorder Point Before the Ber-Months

There is a particular kind of frustration that only business owners know. It is the moment a customer asks for the one item everyone has been buying, and you have to say it is out of stock. You know they will not wait. You know they will walk down the street and buy it somewhere else, and there is a fair chance they will just keep buying it there. The sale is gone, and quietly, so is a bit of the relationship.

If that has happened to you, it does not mean you were careless. Most owners are tracking stock the way it has always been tracked, by eye and by memory, while also handling staff, suppliers, customers, and everything else in a single day. The problem is not attention. The problem is that the moment to reorder always arrives while you are busy with something else. What helps is having the decision made in advance, as a number, so it does not depend on catching it in time.

Two ways guessing costs you money

When there is no reorder point, you are choosing between two mistakes without realizing it, and both are expensive.

Order too late and you run out. The cost is not only the sales you did not make. It is the customer who found another supplier, the staff time spent apologizing, and often a rush order at a worse price just to get stock back on the shelf. During peak season this hurts the most, because the demand you missed was the demand you had been waiting all year for.

Order too early or too much and you are fine on the shelf but tight in the bank. Money that could have paid rent, salaries, or a supplier now sits in boxes at the back. The stock is not lost, but it is asleep, and it will not wake up until someone buys it. Both mistakes are invisible on a busy day. Both show up later in your cash.

Stock is cash in a different shape. Deciding when to reorder is really deciding when to convert cash into inventory, and how long you can afford to leave it there.

The number that answers the question "when"

The reorder point is simply the stock level at which you place your next order. Not a date on the calendar, and not a feeling. A level. When the item drops to that level, you order, because from that point onward you have just enough stock left to keep selling until the delivery arrives.

In plain words: your reorder point is how much you sell in a day, multiplied by the number of days your supplier takes to deliver, plus a buffer for the days that do not go as planned.

The three things you need to know

• Average daily sales. How many units of that item you sell on a normal day. Take a recent month, divide total units sold by the number of selling days, and you have a workable figure.
• Supplier lead time. The number of days between placing your order and having the stock actually on your shelf, not the number of days the supplier promises. Use what has really happened.
• Safety buffer. Extra days of stock to absorb the surprises: a delayed delivery, a sudden bulk order, a supplier who is out of stock themselves. Two to five days is a sensible starting range for most items.

A worked example, with every number shown

Say you run a small retail store, and your strongest item sells about 12 units on a normal day. Your supplier consistently delivers 7 days after you place the order. You want a 3 day buffer, because that supplier has been late before and this is an item you cannot afford to run out of.

• Stock you will sell while waiting for delivery: 12 units per day multiplied by 7 days equals 84 units.
• Safety buffer: 12 units per day multiplied by 3 days equals 36 units.
• Reorder point: 84 plus 36 equals 120 units.

So the rule for that item becomes simple enough to write on a card and tape to the stockroom door: when we are down to 120 units, we order. Not when the shelf looks thin, not when someone remembers. At 120. If the delivery arrives on schedule, you receive new stock while about 36 units are still on hand. If the supplier is two days late, you are still selling.

Notice what this does to your week. You no longer have to keep watching that item and judging whether it feels low. You have converted a daily worry into a single number that anyone on your team can act on, including on the days you are not in the store.

Adjusting for the ber-months

Here is where many businesses get caught. A reorder point computed on normal months quietly becomes wrong the moment the season turns, because both of its main inputs change at the same time.

First, you sell faster. If that same item moves 20 units a day in December instead of 12, your stock drains at nearly double the speed. Second, your supplier gets slower, because every other business is ordering too. A lead time that is 7 days in August can easily become 10 days in November.

Recompute with peak numbers and the change is significant. Twenty units a day multiplied by 10 days of lead time equals 200 units, plus a 3 day buffer of 60 units, giving a peak reorder point of 260 units. Compared with 120 in a normal month, that is more than double. An owner who keeps using the old number will place the order at what feels like the right moment and still run dry in the middle of the best selling week of the year.

This is why mid-August is the right time to do this. You still have weeks to confirm lead times with your suppliers, and you can raise your reorder points before the season starts rather than in the middle of it.

Do this for your top earners first, not for everything

You do not need a reorder point for every item you carry, and trying to build one for all of them is the fastest way to abandon the whole exercise. Start with the handful of items that genuinely carry your business: the ones that bring in the most peso profit, not simply the ones that sell in the largest quantity. Those are the items where a stockout costs you real money and where a well timed order protects both your sales and your customer relationships.

It is also worth being honest about the cash side. Raising your reorder points for the season means buying earlier and holding more, which means more cash sitting in stock for several weeks before it sells. That is a reasonable trade for your best items and a poor one for slow movers. The goal is not maximum stock. It is having enough of the right things, ordered at the right moment, without emptying the bank to get there.

A simple way to start this week

• Pick your three best earning items. If you are not sure which they are, start with the three you would least like to run out of.
• For each one, write down your average daily sales from the last full month.
• Call or message each supplier and ask two things: their current lead time, and whether it will change during the ber-months.
• Compute the reorder point for each item, then compute the peak season version using higher daily sales and a longer lead time.
• Write both numbers where your team can see them, and agree that when stock hits that level, the order goes out that same day.

Seeing the level in time

All of this rests on one condition: knowing your current stock level and your real sales pace while there is still time to act on them. That is genuinely difficult when sales sit in one system, stock is counted by hand every few weeks, and the two are only reconciled long after the decision moment has passed.

This is the kind of visibility Quenta is built to give Philippine business owners. When your sales, stock movement, and cash sit in one real-time view, a reorder point stops being a calculation you do once and forget. It becomes something you can actually see coming, early enough to place the order calmly, before your best item runs out during your best month.

That visibility extends across locations too. See how multi-location inventory software keeps stock levels and reorder decisions clear branch by branch.