Setting lead time, safety stock & restock to
Available on: Pro and above.
Three settings decide when Stockie tells you to reorder and how much it suggests you order: lead time, safety stock and restock to. You set them once for the whole store, then override them for the suppliers and products that behave differently.
| Setting | Measured in | What it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Lead time | Days | When you are told to reorder |
| Safety stock | Days | When you are told to reorder |
| Restock to | Days | How much you are told to order |
All three are set in days, not units. Stockie converts them to units using each variant's sales velocity, so the same setting produces a different quantity for a fast seller than for a slow one.
Set them at Forecast & replenishment → Manage settings → Reordering .
Lead time
Lead time is the number of days between placing an order with a supplier and the stock arriving and being available to sell.
Stockie uses it to work out how much you will sell while you wait. At 5 units a day and a 14-day lead time, you will sell about 70 units before the delivery lands, so the reorder point has to sit high enough to cover them.
Set it too low and you reorder too late and risk running out. Set it too high and you reorder earlier than you need to and hold stock you are not selling yet.
Safety stock
Safety stock is the buffer you hold on top of forecast demand, in days of cover, to absorb a late delivery or a spike in sales.
It raises the reorder point without changing the order quantity. At 5 units a day, 30 days of safety stock keeps 150 units in reserve.
Restock to
Restock to is the days of cover you want to be holding once the delivery arrives. It sets the size of the suggested order, not its timing.
The setup wizard starts it at 90 days, which covers about three months of stock. You can change it whenever you like, for your whole store or for individual suppliers and products.
Restock to works best when it is greater than lead time plus safety stock. At or below that, a delivery lands you back under your own reorder point, so the variant is flagged again the moment the stock arrives.
On your store defaults Stockie will not let you save a combination that breaks this - the three defaults apply to everything, so a bad combination there affects your whole catalogue.
On a supplier or a variant you can save it, and Stockie warns you instead. That is deliberate: a supplier who genuinely takes longer to deliver than you can afford to hold stock is describing their situation, not misconfiguring anything. What you get is a note about the cadence it produces:
- Restock to at or below safety stock - affected products stay flagged with little or nothing to order until stock falls well below the reorder point
- Restock to between that and the full sum - there is always something to order, but you get frequent small suggestions rather than a sensible order size
Setting your store defaults
These apply to every variant that has no supplier value and no override of its own.
Go to Forecast & replenishment → Manage settings → Reordering . The Default settings card holds Lead time, Safety stock and Restock to, each with its own edit control, so you change them one at a time rather than filling in a form and saving once.
All three defaults are required. Stockie cannot forecast a reorder point for a variant that has no lead time or no safety stock resolved from anywhere.
Per-supplier values
A supplier can carry its own lead time, safety stock and restock to. Any product linked to that supplier uses the supplier's values in place of your store defaults.
Open the supplier from Suppliers and set them in its Settings section, under Lead time (days), Safety stock (days) and Restock to (days). Suppliers with their own values are also listed in the Supplier overrides card on the Reordering page, and clicking one opens it.
This is usually a better fit than a store default, because delivery time is a property of the supplier rather than of your store. An overseas supplier at 45 days and a local one at 3 days both stay accurate without touching a single product.
Where a product has more than one supplier, only the primary supplier's values apply.
Per-variant overrides
Override individual variants where the supplier and store values do not fit - a high-priority line that needs a deeper buffer, or a slow mover you want to restock to fewer days.
- On the Reordering page, find the Variant overrides card and click Manage.
- Edit Lead time, Safety stock or Restock to directly in the table. Changes save as you type.
- Leave a field empty to fall back to the supplier or store value.
To set the same value across many variants, filter the table - by tag, for example - select the matching variants and use the bulk actions.
Which value wins
Each of the three settings resolves on its own, in this order:
- The variant's own override
- The primary supplier's value
- Your store default
Because they resolve independently, one variant can take its lead time from an override, its safety stock from its supplier, and its restock to from your store default. A supplier lead time does not pull the supplier's other values across with it.
Where a variant has a min or max level, those levels decide when to reorder and how much, and the settings on this page do not apply to it. See min/max reorder settings.
A worked example
A variant selling 5 units a day, on the defaults the setup wizard offers, with 200 units available and none on the way:
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Sales velocity | 5 units/day |
| Lead time | 14 days |
| Safety stock | 30 days |
| Restock to | 90 days |
| Available inventory | 200 units |
| Incoming | 0 units |
Reorder point = (lead time + safety stock) × velocity = (14 + 30) × 5 = 220 units
At 200 units, this variant is already below its reorder point, so Stockie flags it. Stock on its way counts too - with 30 units incoming it would sit at 230, above the reorder point, and not be flagged.
Suggested reorder quantity = (restock to × velocity) + (lead time × velocity) - (available + incoming) = (90 × 5) + (14 × 5) - 200 = 450 + 70 - 200 = 320 units
The lead time demand is in there because you keep selling while you wait. Ordering 250 units would land you at your 450-unit target only if nothing sold in the 14 days in between.
Where you hold less stock than you would sell during the lead time, Stockie counts only what you actually have or have on the way. A variant with 40 units between them and 70 units of lead time demand contributes 40, not 70, because the 30 units of demand after it runs out are sales you cannot make.
Cutting restock to from 90 days to 30 changes the suggestion to 20 units, and leaves the reorder point untouched at 220. Timing and quantity move independently.
Twenty looks small against 320 until you look at what you hold. A 30-day target is 150 units, plus 70 units of lead time demand is 220, and you already have 200 - so 20 units gets you there. That is what a monthly ordering cadence looks like when the previous setting was sizing a quarter.